Absent Without Leave

Posted on June 21, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By James Howard Kunstler

It ain’t bragging if it’s true. I’ve said repeatedly on this blog for years that the federal government would only become more impotent, more incompetent, and more ineffectual as The Long Emergency rolled out. And here we are now, at just such pass in history.

The process has been well underway since the beginning of the century. Even the attempts to expand its scope and reach — such as the post 9-11 addition of God-knows-how-many new intelligence services — has only produced an epic clusterfuck of cross-purposed mission creep that threatens the federal government’s existential legitimacy.

After nearly a year of investigating, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, DHS, et. al. haven’t been able to leak any substantial fact about “Russian collusion” with the Trump election campaign — and, considering the torrent of leaks about all manner of other collateral matters during this same period, it seems impossible to conclude that there is anything actually there besides utterly manufactured hysteria.

Now, one might imagine that this intelligence community could have manufactured some gift-wrapped facts rather than just waves of hysteria, but that’s where the incompetence and impotence comes in. They never came up with anything besides Flynn and Sessions having conversations with the Russian ambassador — as if the ambassadors are not here to have conversations with our government officials. You’d think that with all the computer graphics available these days they could concoct a cineplex-quality feature film-length recording of Donald Trump making a “great deal” to swap Kansas for Lithuania, or Jared Kushner giving piggyback rides to Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. But all we’ve really ever gotten was a packet of emails from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta of the Clinton campaign gloating about how nicely they fucked over Bernie Sanders — and that doesn’t exactly reflect so well on what has evolved to be the so-called “Resistance.”

The net effect of all this sound and fury is a government so paralyzed that it can’t even pass bad legislation or execute its existing (excessive) duties. That might theoretically be a good thing, except what we’re seeing are individual departments just veering off on their own, especially the military, which now operates without any civilian control. Apparently General Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, pretty much decided on his own to dispatch another 8,000 US troops to Afghanistan to move things along there in the war’s 16^th year. Or did he get President Trump to look up from his Twitter window for three seconds to explain the situation and get a nod of approval?

Perhaps you also didn’t notice the news item over the weekend that a US-led fighter plane coalition shot down a Syrian air force plane in Syrian airspace. In an earlier era that could easily be construed as an act of war. Who gave the order for that, you have to wonder. And what will the consequences be? Reasonable people might also ask: haven’t we already made enough deadly mischief in that part of the world?

With the US military gone rogue in foreign lands, and the intelligence community off-the-reservation at home, and the Trump White House all gummed up in the tarbaby of RussiaGate, and the House and Senate lost in the shuffle, you also have to wonder what anybody is going to do about the imminent technical bankruptcy of the USA as the Treasury Department spends down its dwindling fund of remaining cash money to pay ongoing expenses — everything from agriculture subsidies to Medicare. That well is going dry in the middle of the summer, and without any resolution to the debt ceiling debate, the country will not be able to borrow more to pretend that it’s solvent.

I don’t see any indication that the House and Senate will be able to bluster their way through this. Instead, the situation will compel extraordinary new acts of financial fraud via the central banks and its cadre of Too-Big-To-Fail associates. In the event, the likely outcome will be a spectacular fall in the value of the US dollar, and perhaps consecutively, the collapse of the equity and real estate markets.

The public may not give a shit about Syria, Afghanistan, or federal dairy supports, but they’ll sure perk up and notice that their money is going worthless. I doubt they’ll be clamoring for Hillary Clinton to be installed as the first US Caesar to fix it all.

America’s Retarded Awareness

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Denis Conroy

(RINF)

Alternative ideas don’t come easily to Americans. It seems that Americans imported colonial hierarchal practices from Europe to cultivate them to their own advantage. Over millennia, Europeans had come to accept the authority of Church, Monarchy or State Principalities to be the places where the ‘rightful-centres’ existed. The ‘rightful-centre’ was always beyond the reach of the masses. Pontiffs and warlords alike had built their power base upon the belief that the common people should accept the fact that the centre of power was somewhere above their heads and that it was the lot of underlings to live the life of fellow travellers.

The Confucian idea, that the centre was everywhere, had failed to penetrate the European pantheon. In Asia, actions and their consequences were measured in language that was neither hierarchical nor internalised within rhetorical borders, but connected to truths that had their origin in humanity-oriented-grass-root realism…ethics. Europe, for its part, went the way of evangelical Christianity by legitimizing religion as the celebrity voice par excellence. Operating in space above the heads of the common folk, Emperors and Popes engaged in the practice of issuing edicts that instructed the commoners on how they should think and respond to the celebrity classes doing their thinking for them.

Branding religion was the event that opened the door to the branding of everything. Patriarchal authority, the central tenet of the Old Testament, reappeared again in the guise of male-dominated New Testament culture when it was integrated into the Roman state. Rebranding regulations to secure the authority of the power-base required a narrative that sought to recluse authority from popular critique. The Founding Fathers in Rome or Washington, became very astute in crafting directives and devices that enabled them to toss their bountiful wisdom to an amorphous flock that would forever defer to their ‘wisdom’. The creation of an inscrutable Machiavellian dimension…secrecy…put in place to coddle the aspirations of the commoners, had the desired effect of separating them from the business of government.

By these means, the State as a force-unto-itself came into being, with lawmakers, merchants and agents of the evangelical stripe committing rank, energy and capital to fulfilling a dream of progress that would see them on a path to seeking mastery over all things…nature included…per subjugation of all things. This was the philosophy that the colonial mind found prepossessing…business-as-usual as a staple operation that would take devotees of their exceptional ilk anywhere they chose to go to, expropriate whatever resources were available to them, while defiling the health of the planet in the process…and think about what we Westerners became and what we did and to whom in the process?

When the genie was released from Europe’s empirical arse-crack, was it because the grass looked greener across the vast expanses of America’s prairies which appeared to be there for the taking? Was the Australian bush an all too alluring opportunity to rebrand someone else’s homeland? Europeans, living midway between science and barbarism went across the world to smote the idyllic ‘innocents’ living midway between paradise and paralysis, believing them to be inferior. With a pugnacious conviction born of arrogance, they swarmed through the greener-grasses with scant regard for life or limb.

So, moving on to present day America…which sees itself as the leader of the free world… who or what can explain the introverted perspectives that draw the national psyche into an ever-expanding empirical loop. There is much evidence available to show that a covert passion for Great-Game memes continues to haunt the power-elites in Washington. It now seems that American presidents may come and go but Henry Kissinger is here to stay. Henry…who served first as Nixon’s national security adviser and then as his secretary of state 1969 until 1974… and nowadays frequently seen slumped in a chair in the Oval Office, looking like a grim medieval gargoyle, whose drooping flesh and demeanour convey an image of intransigence…worthy of Machiavelli’s attention… hovering there to counsel the many presidents who pass through the White House, in the art of genuflecting before Zion. Henry, the Zionist Pope, keen to examine the credentials of all those aspiring to occupy this high office, conjures up the inevitable question; at what point in time did this secondary space and highest office in the land become a Zionist habitat?

Strangest of all, the recent election happened and hardly anybody gave a fig about the destructive consequences of America’s wars abroad. It was like permanent war was o.k. so long as it happens in somebody else’s country…or benefited Israel. The public, before-during-and-after the election, expressed zilch concern for the millions of people their government had destroyed. After all, the American corporate juggernaut was unstoppably hooked on exploiting the globe…leave no paddock unexploited…and the electorate, the fellow travellers… who accepted the propagandized narrative coming per media…from above their heads…would always accept corporate branded salve.

What helped them to ignore the consequences of permanent war was an inhouse injunction…the American narrative had become a religion that represented all that was good for business as gospel…and that was that! Confirming the only ‘reality’ they knew, the fellow travellers passively accepted a piece of the action. America’s brutality in the world at large would continue, signalling that ‘butcher shop’ carte blanche would go on, regardless of who was elected.

The election focused on brand and who would control the narrative. The winner was ‘more-of-the-same’…and that was good for business. The election was merely about people choosing their favourite celebrity, but the one who succeeded failed to fulfil the expectations of the liberal-elite and that meant a ‘wigs-on-the-green’ melee was in the offing. An awareness-deficient electorate left the rest of the world wondering if there was much difference between educated and uneducated Americans.

Where were the voices that might have stormed the barricades with rhetoric that condemned the American practice of sending its apprentices…butcher-boys all…abroad to kill! Kill! Kill! Awareness was absent because the electorate was too comfortable with the hierarchical world above their heads…Wall Street, the Pentagon and the accompanying galaxy of job opportunities available to the educated and uneducated alike. After all, inclusion in the system was all that mattered come payday… and after all, cash cows R us!

“According to U.S. Census 2013 data, 1.68 percent of Americans over the age of 25 have a PhD. This equates to approximately 2.5 million people. People with professional degrees such as MD or DDS make up 1.8 percent of the U.S. population making the total percent of Americans referred to as doctors equal to 3.16 percent.

The vast majority of adults in the U.S., over 88 percent, have a high school diploma or additional education. Around 31 percent of the population has a bachelor’s degree or higher, and almost 12 percent have a master’s degree or higher”…which begs the question; how can so many people live with so much carnage? Can it be that the American dream of freedom and independence, for so long the playbook of the straight white man expressing racial bravado in his quest for dominance, is now beginning to show evidence of him falling…in slow motion…upon his own petard?

As America grew bigger and bolder and wealthier, the echelons attached to the running of the state multiplied too. In subtle ways, the business of the people operating in the zone above the level of the common people became ever more numerous and secretive…after 9/11, the main perpetrators of secrecy became the CIA and the FBI, regulating the level of fear to kept the public focused on fabricated threats designed to promulgate the ‘war-on terror’ mantra. In the process, the temporal beast grew an extra dimension of the mystical kind to extend its purview beyond its own borders so that the people could believe that greatness was now a context in which America and Americans could shine and shove it to the world. What was happening abroad was bound to enrich them…and to hell with the consequences.

Americans, surfing the contours of their very own exceptional imperial arse-crack, in quest of ever easier access to mother nature’s assets, deluded themselves into believing that the assets allocated to sand-bunnies and other assorted detritus were mistakes that needed correcting. Deriving emotional security from the possession of their vast stock of ballistic missiles, the American imperial persona descended into a state of amnesia as a convenient way of ignoring the increasing problem of the body-count forever multiplying in the countries they were rendering dysfunctional. American boots on the ground had come to spell venality abroad and valour at home.

What was happening abroad was inconsequential…reportage at home became more heated, but it had little impact on a critique-resistant ‘exceptional’ entity like astigmatic America. Retarded awareness was turning the ‘great’ society into an intellectual cadaver…critique had caught some fatal disease that caused ‘John Brown’s Body’ to mournfully turn in its grave.

As Uncle Sam, in horizontal locomotion style, cast his war-ware across the Muslim world, people came to recognized the familiar appearance of the grim reaper, hidden in the folds of the stars and stripes, as their great airpower transported democracy eastwards. They were aware that death and destruction in their country had long ceased to receive much attention in Western media. America was too busy navel-gazing.

To be too preoccupied with one’s own anatomy or infrastructure is likely to cause serious problems for people who live in glasshouses. America’s post traumatic rage over the result of the 2016 presidential election might have gained something if people had stopped a moment to reflect on proverbial insightfulness for a moment, “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.

Ad hominem warfare in America is spreading like wildfire. The population is determined to leave no stone unturned. A veritable ‘kristallnacht’ of sorts, affecting the secondary classes…celebrity classes…more than the ‘deplorable-class’ suggests that the America dream and its affiliations with politic heft and hove is up shit-creek. The current brand of stone thrower lives in that space above the common people’s heads and personifies the American dream from a specific perspective; status, power, money, independence et al… and nothing gels!

But on second thought, perhaps proverbial wisdom needs revision; for example; insular people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw tantrums or missiles.

And there’s more; Wall Street, AIPAC, The Pentagon, The FBI, The CIA, The State Department, T.V. Talk Hosts, Established Media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and countless other membranous boundaries that represent the hydra-headed social order are all insular to a man (or woman). Insularity however, inevitably means more trouble for the uninitiated masses excluded from the banquet… secrecy being the better part of valour…but?

So, we don’t ever really know what goes on behind closed doors. Nobody ever comes through the door to explain why evangelical America threatens 150 million Russian Christians with nuclear annihilation. Nobody comes through the door to explain why American bombing throughout the Middle East is Guernica writ large in perpetuity…as was the case with Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc. etc., Nobody knows who decides which democratically elected government abroad is next in line for regime change. Nobody, on the other hand, is ever allowed to enter the closed doors that conceal the little men who ruminate over charts, statistics, numbers, surveillance data and funding dossiers that help insular careerists to navigate a path ever deeper into Doctor Strangelove’s hoary entrails where drone strikes and Armageddon is contemplated.

The American Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington all have their place in history as instructors…and instructors are there to advise one on how to move forward. The great achievement of the new great country which embarked on so many projects to develop infrastructure, failed to acknowledge that developing at so great a tempo left no time to reflect on the consequences of its actions. As it rushed headlong into the future, it lost sight of where it was coming from.

On becoming a country without a past, its memory span disappeared more and more as the locomotion of its enterprise took America ever deeper into an illusion that the country had to keep its foot on the accelerator 24/7 to achieve greatness for all. In the absence of grass-root ethics that might have revealed the connection between object and subject, respecting and being respected, ‘greatness’ became a synonym of pedigree and power… ‘us-and-them’ a code for superior and inferior, exceptional and unexceptional. The America of superman fame adopted the eagle as super-bird, not as a Phoenix rising in a new world, but as a symbol of a bird of prey with a mission to destroy…the corporeal devouring the spiritual! …History does repeat itself!

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest”…………..Confucius, 551—479 BC……..

America’s Real Red Scare

Posted on June 14, 2017 by Reid Mukai

The Slow-Motion Collapse of the American Empire

By William J. Astore

Source: TomDispatch.com

Jump into your time machine and let me transport you back to another age.

It’s May 2001 and the Atlantic Monthly has just arrived in the mail. I’m tantalized by the cover article. “Russia is finished,” the magazine announces. The subtitle minces no words: “The unstoppable descent into social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance.” Could it be that the country I had worried most about as a military officer during all those grim years of the Cold War, the famed “Evil Empire” that had threatened us with annihilation, was truly kaput, even in its Russian rather than Soviet guise?

Sixteen years later, the article’s message seems just a tad premature. Today’s Russia surely has its problems — from poverty to pollution to prostitution to a rickety petro-economy — but on the geopolitical world stage it is “finished” no longer. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has recently been enjoying heightened influence, largely at the expense of a divided and disputatious superpower that now itself seems to be on an “unstoppable descent.”

Sixteen years after Russia was declared irrelevant, a catastrophe, finito, it is once again a colossus — at least on the American political scene, if nowhere else. And that should disturb you far less than this: more than a generation after defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the United States of 2017 seems to be doing its level best to emulate some of the worst aspects of its former foe and once rival superpower.

Yes, the U.S. has a Soviet problem, and I’m not referring to the allegations of the moment in Washington: that the Trump campaign and Russian officials colluded, that money may have flowed into that campaign via Russian oligarchs tied to Putin, that the Russians hacked the U.S. election to aid Donald Trump, that those close to the president-elect dreamed of setting up a secret back channel to Moscow and suggested to the Russian ambassador that it be done through the Russian embassy, or even that Putin has a genuine hold of some sort on Donald Trump. All of this is, of course, generating attention galore, as well as outrage, in the mainstream media and among the chattering classes, leading some to talk of a new “red scare” in America. All of it is also being investigated, whether by congressional intelligence committees or by former FBI director — now special counsel — Robert Mueller.

When it comes to what I’m talking about, though, you don’t need a committee or a counsel or a back channel or a leaker from some intelligence agency to ferret it out. Whatever Trump campaign officials, Russian oligarchs, or Vladimir Putin himself did or didn’t do, America’s Soviet problem is all around us: a creeping (and creepy) version of authoritarianism that anyone who lived through the Cold War years should recognize. It involves an erosion of democratic values; the ever-expanding powers exercised by a national security state operating as a shadow government and defined by militarism, surveillance, secrecy, prisons, and other structures of dominance and control; ever-widening gaps between the richest few and the impoverished many; and, of course, ever more weapons, along with ever more wars.

That’s a real red scare, America, and it’s right here in the homeland.

In February, if you remember — and given the deluge of news, half news, rumor, and innuendo, who can remember anything these days? — Donald Trump memorably compared the U.S. to Russia. When Bill O’Reilly called Vladimir Putin “a killer” in an interview with the new president, he responded that there was little difference between us and them, for — as he put it — we had our killers, too, and weren’t exactly innocents abroad when it came to world affairs. (“There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”) The president has said a lot of outlandish things in his first months in office, but here he was on to something.

My Secret Briefing on the Soviet Union

When I was a young lieutenant in the Air Force, in 1986 if memory serves, I attended a secret briefing on the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan was president, and we had no clue that we were living through the waning years of the Cold War. Back then, believing that I should know my enemy, I was reading a lot about the Soviets in “open sources”; you know, books, magazines, and newspapers. The “secret” briefing I attended revealed little that was new to me. (Classified information is often overhyped.) I certainly heard no audacious predictions of a Soviet collapse in five years (though the Soviet Union would indeed implode in 1991). Like nearly everyone at the time, the briefers assumed the USSR would be our archenemy for decades to come and it went without saying that the Berlin Wall was a permanent fixture in a divided Europe, a forever symbol of ruthless Communist oppression.

Little did we know that, three years later, the Soviet military would stand aside as East Germans tore down that wall. And who then would have believed that a man might be elected president of the United States a generation later on the promise of building a “big, fat, beautiful wall” on our shared border with Mexico?

I wasn’t allowed to take notes during that briefing, but I remember the impression I was left with: that the USSR was deeply authoritarian, a grim surveillance state with an economy dependent on global weapons sales; that it was intent on nuclear domination; that it was imperialist and expansionist; that it persecuted its critics and dissidents; and that it had serious internal problems carefully suppressed in the cause of world mastery, including rampant alcohol and drug abuse, bad health care and declining longevity (notably for men), a poisoned environment, and an extensive prison system featuring gulags. All of this was exacerbated by festering sores overseas, especially a costly and stalemated war in Afghanistan and client-states that absorbed its resources (think: Cuba) while offering little in return.

This list of Soviet problems, vintage 1986, should have a familiar ring to it, since it sounds uncannily like a description of what’s wrong with the United States today.

In case you think that’s an over-the-top statement, let’s take that list from the briefing — eight points in all — one item at a time.

1. An authoritarian, surveillance state: The last time the U.S. Congress formally declared war was in 1941. Since then, American presidents have embarked on foreign wars and interventions ever more often with ever less oversight from Congress. Power continues to grow and coalesce in the executive branch, strengthening an imperial presidency enhanced by staggering technologies of surveillance, greatly expanded in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Indeed, America now has 17 intelligence agencies with a combined yearly budget of $80 billion. Unsurprisingly, Americans are surveilled more than ever, allegedly for our safety even if such a system breeds meekness and stifles dissent.

2. An economy dependent on global weapons sales: The U.S. continues to dominate the global arms trade in a striking fashion. It was no mistake that a centerpiece of President Trump’s recent trip was a $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. On the same trip, he told the Emir of Qatar that he was in the Middle East to facilitate “the purchase of lots of beautiful military equipment.” Now more than ever, beautiful weaponry made in the U.S.A. is a significant driver of domestic economic growth as well as of the country’s foreign policy.

3. Bent on nuclear domination: Continuing the policies of President Obama, the Trump administration envisions a massive modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal, to the tune of at least a trillion dollars over the next generation. Much like an old-guard Soviet premier, Trump has boasted that America will always remain at “the top of the pack” when it comes to nuclear weapons.

4. Imperialist and expansionist: Historians speak of America’s “informal” empire, by which they mean the U.S. is less hands-on than past imperial powers like the Romans and the British. But there’s nothing informal or hands-off about America’s 800 overseas military bases or the fact that its Special Operations forces are being deployed in 130 or more countries yearly. When the U.S. military speaks of global reach, global power, and full-spectrum dominance, this is traditional imperialism cloaked in banal catchphrases. Put differently, Soviet imperialism, which American leaders always professed to fear, never had a reach of this sort.

5. Persecutes critics and dissidents: Whether it’s been the use of the Patriot Act under George W. Bush’s presidency, the persecution of whistleblowers using the World War I-era Espionage Act under the Obama administration, or the vilification of the media by the new Trump administration, the U.S. is far less tolerant of dissent today than it was prior to the Soviet collapse. As Homeland Security Secretary and retired four-star Marine General John Kelly recently put it, speaking of news stories about the Trump administration based on anonymous intelligence sources, such leaks are “darn close to treason.” Add to such an atmosphere Trump’s attacks on the media as the “enemy” of the people and on critical news stories as “fake” and you have an environment ripe for the future suppression of dissent.

In the Soviet Union, political opponents were often threatened with jail or worse, and those threats were regularly enforced by men wearing military or secret police uniforms. In that context, let’s not forget the “Lock her up!” chants led by retired Lt. General Michael Flynn at the Republican National Convention and aimed at Donald Trump’s political opponent of that moment, Hillary Clinton.

6. Internal problems like drug abuse, inadequate health care, and a poisoned environment: Alcoholism is still rife in Russia and environmental damage widespread, but consider the U.S. today. An opioid crisis is killing more than 30,000 people a year. Lead poisoning in places like Flint, Michigan, and New Orleans is causing irreparable harm to the young. The disposal of wastewater from fracking operations is generating earthquakes in Ohio and Oklahoma. Even as environmental hazards proliferate, the Trump administration is gutting the Environmental Protection Agency. As health crises grow more serious, the Trump administration, abetted by a Republican-led Congress, is attempting to cut health-care coverage and benefits, as well as the funding that might protect Americans from deadly pathogens. Disturbingly, as with the Soviet Union in the era of its collapse, life expectancy among white men is declining, mainly due to drug abuse, suicide, and other despair-driven problems.

7. Extensive prison systems: As a percentage of its population, no country imprisons more of its own people than the United States. While more than two million of their fellow citizens languish in prisons, Americans continue to see their nation as a beacon of freedom, ignoring Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In addition, the country now has a president who believes in torture, who has called for the murder of terrorists’ families, and who wants to refill Guantánamo with prisoners. It also has an attorney general who wants to make prison terms for low-level drug offenders ever more draconian.

8. Stalemated wars: You have to hand it to the Soviets. They did at least exhibit a learning curve in their disastrous war in Afghanistan and so the Red Army finally left that country in 1989 after a decade of high casualties and frustration (even if its troops returned to a land on the verge of implosion). U.S. forces, on the other hand, have been in Afghanistan for 16 years, with the Taliban growing ever stronger, yet its military’s response has once again been to call for investing more money and sending in more troops to reverse the “stalemate” there. Meanwhile, after 14 years, Iraq War 3.0 festers, bringing devastation to places like Mosul, even as its destabilizing results continue to manifest themselves in Syria and indeed throughout the greater Middle East. Despite or rather because of these disastrous results, U.S. leaders continue to over-deploy U.S. Special Operations forces, contributing to exhaustion and higher suicide rates in the ranks.

In light of these eight points, that lighthearted Beatles tune and relic of the Cold War, “Back in the USSR,” takes on a new, and far harsher, meaning.

What Is to Be Done?

Slowly, seemingly inexorably, the U.S. is becoming more like the former Soviet Union. Just to begin the list of similarities: too many resources are being devoted to the military and the national security state; too many over-decorated generals are being given too much authority in government; bleeding-ulcer wars continue unstanched in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere; infrastructure (roads, bridges, pipelines, dams, and so on) continues to crumble; restless “republics” grumble about separating from the union (Calexit!); rampant drug abuse and declining life expectancy are now American facts of life. Meanwhile, the latest U.S. president is, in temperament, authoritarian, even as government “services” take on an increasingly nepotistic flavor at the top.

I’m worried, comrade! Echoing the cry of the great Lenin, what is to be done? Given the list of symptoms, here’s one obvious 10-step approach to the de-sovietization of America:

1. Decrease “defense” spending by 10% annually for the next five years. In the Soviet spirit, think of it as a five-year plan to restore our revolution (as in the American Revolution), which was, after all, directed against imperial policies exercised by a “bigly” king.

2. Cut the number of generals and admirals in the military by half, and get rid of all the meaningless ribbons, badges, and medals they wear. In other words, don’t just cut down on the high command but on their tendency to look (and increasingly to act) like Soviet generals of old. And don’t allow them to serve in high governmental positions until they’ve been retired for at least 10 years.

3. Get our military out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and other war-torn countries in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Reduce that imperial footprint overseas by closing costly military bases.

4. Work to eliminate nuclear weapons globally by, as a first step, cutting the vast U.S. arsenal in half and forgetting about that trillion-dollar “modernization” program. Eliminate land-based ICBMs first; they are no longer needed for any meaningful deterrent purposes.

5. Take the money saved on “modernizing” nukes and invest it in updating America’s infrastructure.

6. Curtail state surveillance. Freedom needs privacy to flourish. As a nation, we need to remember that security is not the bedrock of democracy — the U.S. Constitution is.

7. Work to curb drug abuse by cutting back on criminalization. Leave the war mentality behind, including the “war on drugs,” and focus instead on providing better treatment programs for addicts. Set a goal of cutting America’s prison population in half over the next decade.

8. Life expectancy will increase with better health care. Provide health care coverage for all using a single-payer system. Every American should have the same coverage as a member of Congress. People shouldn’t be suffering and dying because they can’t afford to see a doctor or pay for their prescriptions.

9. Nothing is more fundamental to “national security” than clean air and water. It’s folly to risk poisoning the environment in the name of either economic productivity or building up the military. If you doubt this, ask citizens of Russia and the former Soviet Republics, who still struggle with the fallout from the poisonous environmental policies of Soviet days.

10. Congress needs to assert its constitutional authority over war and the budget, and begin to act like the “check and balance” it’s supposed to be when it comes to executive power.

There you have it. These 10 steps should go some way toward solving America’s real Russian problem — the Soviet one. Won’t you join me, comrade?

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor, is a TomDispatch regular. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Oligarchs Succeed! Only the People Suffer!

Posted on June 13, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By James Petra

Source: The Fourth Media

On a scale not seen since the ‘great’ world depression of the 1930’s, the US political system is experiencing sharp political attacks, divisions and power grabs. Executive firings, congressional investigations, demands for impeachment, witch hunts, threats of imprisonment for ‘contempt of Congress’ and naked power struggles have shredded the façade of political unity and consensus among competing powerful US oligarchs.

For the first time in US history, the incumbent elected president struggles on a daily basis to wield state power. The opposition-controlled state (National Public Radio) and corporate organs of mass propaganda are pitted against the presidential regime. Factions of the military elite and business oligarchy face off in the domestic and international arena. The oligarchs debate and insult each other. They falsify charges, plot and deceive. Their political acolytes, who witness these momentous conflicts, are mute, dumb and blind to the real interests at stake.

The struggle between the Presidential oligarch and the Opposition oligarchs has profound consequences for their factions and for the American people. Wars and markets, pursued by sections of the Oligarchs, have led opposing sections to seek control over the means of political manipulation (media and threats of judicial action).

Intense political competition and open political debate have nothing to do with ‘democracy’ as it now exists in the United States.

In fact, it is the absence of real democracy, which permits the oligarchs to engage in serious intra-elite warfare. The marginalized, de-politicized electorate are incapable of taking advantage of the conflict to advance their own interests.

What the ‘Conflict’ is Not About

The ‘life and death’ inter-oligarchical fight is not about peace!

None of the factions of the oligarchy, engaged in this struggle, is aligned with democratic or independent governments.

Neither side seeks to democratize the American electoral process or to dismantle the grotesque police state apparatus.

Neither side has any commitment to a ‘new deal’ for American workers and employees.

Neither is interested in policy changes needed to address the steady erosion of living standards or the unprecedented increase in ‘premature’ mortality among the working and rural classes.

Despite these similarities in their main focus of maintaining oligarchical power and policies against the interests of the larger population, there are deep divisions over the content and direction of the presidential regime and the permanent state apparatus.

What the Oligarchical Struggle is About

There are profound differences between the oligarch factions on the question of overseas wars and ‘interventions’.

The ‘opposition’ (Democratic Party and some Republican elite) pursues a continuation of their policy of global wars, especially aimed at confronting Russian and China, as well as regional wars in Asia and the Middle East. There is a stubborn refusal to modify military policies, despite the disastrous consequences domestically (economic decline and increased poverty) and internationally with massive ethnic cleansing, terrorism, forced migrations of war refugees to Europe, and famine and epidemics (such as cholera and starvation in Yemen).

The Trump Presidency appears to favor increased military confrontation with Iran and North Korea and intervention in Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

The ‘Opposition’ supports multilateral economic and trade agreements, (such as TTP and NAFTA), while Trump favors lucrative ‘bilateral’ economic agreements. Trump relies on trade and investment deals with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates and the formation of an aggressive military ‘axis’ (US-Saudi Arabia-Israel -Gulf Emirates) to eventually overthrow the nationalist regime in Iran and divide the country.

The ‘Opposition’ pursues wars and violent ‘regime change’ to replace disobedient ‘tyrants’ and nationalists and set up ‘client governments’, which will provide bases for the US military empire. Trump’s regime embraces existing dictators, who can invest in his domestic infrastructure agenda.

The ‘opposition’ seeks to maximize the role of Washington’s global military power. President Trump focuses on expanding the US role in the global market.

While both oligarchical factions support US imperialism, they differ in terms of its nature and means.

For the ‘opposition’, every country, large or small, can be a target for military conquest. Trump tends to favor the expansion of lucrative overseas markets, in addition to projecting US military dominance.

Oligarchs: Tactical Similarities

The competition among oligarchs does not preclude similarities in means and tactics. Both factions favor increased military spending, support for the Saudi war on Yemen and intervention in Venezuela. They support trade with China and international sanctions against Russia and Iran. They both display slavish deference to the State of Israel and favor the appointment of openly Zionist agents throughout the political, economic and intelligence apparatus.

These similarities are, however, subject to tactical political propaganda skirmishes. The ‘Opposition’ denounces any deviation in policy toward Russia as ‘treason’, while Trump accuses the ‘Opposition’ of having sacrificed American workers through NAFTA.

Whatever the tactical nuances and similarities, the savage inter-oligarchic struggle is far from a theatrical exercise. Whatever the real and feigned similarities and differences, the oligarchs’ struggle for imperial and domestic power has profound consequence for the political and constitutional order.

Oligarchical Electoral Representation and the Parallel Police State

The ongoing fight between the Trump Administration and the ‘Opposition’ is not the typical skirmish over pieces of legislation or decisions. It is not over control of the nation’s public wealth. The conflict revolves around control of the regime and the exercise of state power.

The opposition has a formidable array of forces, including the national intelligence apparatus (NSA, Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, etc.) and a substantial sector of the Pentagon and defense industry. Moreover, the opposition has created new power centers for ousting President Trump, including the judiciary.

This is best seen in the appointment of former FBI Chief Robert Mueller as ‘Special Investigator’ and key members of the Attorney General’s Office, including Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein. It was Rosenstein who appointed Mueller, after the Attorney General ‘Jeff’ Session (a Trump ally) was ‘forced’ to recluse himself for having ‘met’ with Russian diplomats in the course of fulfilling his former Congressional duties as a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This ‘recusal’ took significant discretionary power away from Trump’s most important ally within the Judiciary.

The web of opposition power spreads and includes former police state officials including mega-security impresario, Michael Chertoff (an associate of Robert Mueller), who headed Homeland Security under GW Bush, John Brennan (CIA), James Comey (FBI) and others.

The opposition dominates the principal organs of propaganda -the press (Washington Post, Financial Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal), television and radio (ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS/ NPR), which breathlessly magnify and prosecute the President and his allies for an ever-expanding web of unsubstantiated ‘crimes and misdemeanors’. Neo-conservative and liberal think tanks and foundations, academic experts and commentators have all joined the ‘hysteria chorus’ and feeding frenzy to oust the President.

The President has an increasingly fragile base of support in his Cabinet, family and closest advisers. He has a minority of supporters in the legislature and possibly in the Supreme Court, despite nominal majorities for the Republican Party.

The President has the passive support of his voters, but they have demonstrated little ability to mobilize in the streets. The electorate has been marginalized.

Outside of politics (the ‘Swamp’ as Trump termed Washington, DC) the President’s trade, investment, taxation and deregulation policies are backed by the majority of investors, who have benefited from the rising stock market. However, ‘money’ does not appear to influence the parallel state.

The divergence between Trumps supporters in the investment community and the political power of the opposition state is one of the most extraordinary changes of our century.

Given the President’s domestic weakness and the imminent threat of a coup d’état, he has turned to securing ‘deals’ with overseas allies, including billion-dollar trade and investment agreements.

The multi-billion arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates will delight the military-industrial complex and its hundreds of thousands of workers.

Political and diplomatic ‘kowtowing’ to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu should please some American Zionists.

But the meetings with the EU in Brussels and with the G7 in Siciliy failed to neutralize Trump’s overseas opposition.

NATO’s European members did not accept Trump’s demands that they increase their contribution to the alliance and they condemned his reluctance to offer unconditional US military support for new NATO members. They showed no sympathy for domestic problems.

In brief, the President’s overseas supporters, meetings and agreements will have little impact on the domestic correlation of forces.

Moreover, there are long-standing ties among the various state apparatuses and spy agencies in the EU and the US, which strengthen the reach of the opposition in their attacks on Trump.

While substantive issues divide the Presidential and Opposition oligarchs, these issues are vertical, not horizontal, cleavages – a question of ‘their’ wars or ‘ours’.

Trump intensified the ideological war with North Korea and Iran; promised to increase ground troops in Afghanistan and Syria; boosted military and advisory support for the Saudi invasion of Yemen; and increased US backing for violent demonstrations and mob attacks in Venezuela.

The opposition demands more provocations against Russia and its allies; and the continuation of former President Obama’s seven wars.

While both sets of oligarchs support the ongoing wars, the major difference is over who is managing the wars and who can be held responsible for the consequences.

Both conflicting oligarchs are divided over who controls the state apparatus since their power depends on which side directs the spies and generates the fake news.

Currently, both sets of oligarchs wash each other’s ‘dirty linen’ in public, while covering up for their collective illicit practices at home and abroad.

The Trump’s oligarchs want to maximize economic deals through ‘uncritical’ support for known tyrants; the opposition ‘critically’ supports tyrants in exchange for access to US military bases and military support for ‘interventions’.

President Trump pushes for major tax cuts to benefit his oligarch allies while making massive cuts in social programs for his hapless supporters. The Opposition supports milder tax cuts and lesser reductions in social programs.

Conclusion

The battle of the oligarchs has yet to reach a decisive climax. President Trump is still the President of the United States. The Opposition forges ahead with its investigations and lurid media exposés.

The propaganda war is continuous. One day the opposition media focuses on a deported student immigrant and the next day the President features new jobs for American military industries.

The emerging left-neo-conservative academic partnership (e.g. Noam Chomsky-William Kristol) has denounced President Trump’s regime as a national ‘catastrophe’ from the beginning. Meanwhile, Wall Street investors and libertarians join to denounce the Opposition’s resistance to major tax ‘reforms’.

Oligarchs of all stripes and colors are grabbing for total state power and wealth while the majority of citizens are labeled ‘losers’ by Trump or ‘deplorables’ by Madame Clinton.

The ‘peace’ movement, immigrant rights groups and ‘black lives matter’ activists have become mindless lackeys pulling the opposition oligarchs’ wagon, while rust-belt workers, rural poor and downwardly mobile middle class employees are powerless serfs hitched to President Trump’s cart.

Epilogue

After the blood-letting, when and if President Trump is overthrown, the State Security functionaries in their tidy dark suits will return to their nice offices to preside over their ‘normal’ tasks of spying on the citizens and launching clandestine operations abroad.

The media will blow out some charming tid-bits and ‘words of truth’ from the new occupant of the ‘Oval Office’.

The academic left will churn out some criticism against the newest ‘oligarch-in-chief’ or crow about how their heroic ‘resistance’ averted a national catastrophe.

Trump, the ex-President and his oligarch son-in-law Jared Kushner will sign new real estate deals. The Saudis will receive the hundreds of billions of dollars of US arms to re-supply ISIS or its successors and to rust in the ‘vast and howling’ wilderness of US-Middle East intervention. Israel will demand even more frequent ‘servicing’ from the new US President.

The triumphant editorialists will claim that ‘our’ unique political system, despite the ‘recent turmoil’, has proven that democracy succeeds … only the people suffer!

Long live the Oligarchs!

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. http://petras.lahaine.org

3 Questions You’re Never Supposed to Ask After a Terrorist Attack

Posted on June 12, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Isaac Davis

Source: Waking Times

In a world where defense budgets are astronomical and wars of occupation and destabilization never end, political leaders in the UK and in Europe want you accept street level terror as the new everyday normal. The attacks are unstoppable, they say, and the world must embrace this hopelessness with faith that the government is doing all it can to create a better, safer world. Run, hide, and call the authorities, for you are helpless in this reality, so they say. But who creates and sustains this reality?

Terrorism is defined as the use of violence in the pursuit of political aims, and as politicians respond to terrorism by holding news conferences, posing, grandstanding, eulogizing, weeping for the cameras, applauding first responders and proposing legislation, so many of the important questions which can help guide us out of such a gloomy future are going unasked and unanswered. And these questions are always the same for any of these attacks, be it the London attacks, Manchester, Orlando, the Boston marathon, 7/7 or 9/11.

Here are three things we should be always ask about when Islamic terror , all of which are fair questions for any of the major terror attacks happening in Western nations.

1. In what ways do Western governments contribute to the problem of Islamic terror?

The media wants you to believe that this type of terror is unrelated to government policies and actions, thus attempting to divorce them from the greater context of geopolitics and the decades long push toward globalist world government. But how do Western governments contribute to the problem of terrorism?

Do never-ending occupations of Middle Eastern conditions and the wrecking of stable nations contribute to terrorism? Does supplying arms and financial support to known terrorist organizations make attacks in Western nations more likely? Does bombing infrastructure, hospitals and civilians in foreign nations play a role? Does promoting and supporting the massive influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants into Western nations have an effect? Does permitting known radicals and others on terror watch lists to operate freely in the West make it more likely that events like the London Bridge attack will occur? Does preventing and punishing people for speaking out in defense of their own nations and customs contribute to the situation?

2. How does government benefit from the reaction to the problem?

Terror creates fear, insecurity, panic, uncertainty, chaos, anger, hate and irrationality, and none are more easily lorded over than those living in terror. Historically, governments make exceptional gains in power and authority when their citizens are psychologically abused.

3. What is the pre-packaged government solution to the problem?

In the case of the London Bridge attacks, the very next day, UK Prime Minister Theresa May called for government regulation of the internet, a demand which is now being echoed by wise politicians and pundits. But this measure was already being floated, it just a dramatic push for it to gain popularity.

Whether it is the Patriot Act, the pre-planned invasion of Afghanistan, calls to restrict the 2nd Amendment, greater government surveillance, increased spending on war and police state security measures, the detainment of innocent people or torture of detainees, the government always has a solution in place before an attack happens.

Final Thoughts

Accepting terror as the norm is absolutely unacceptable and must be totally rejected by people who wish to live in peace and prosperity, which will forever remain impossible while government is allowed to contribute and benefit from terror.

War on Terror: Greatest Covert Op

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Reid Mukai

(Editor’s Note: The following commentary is drawn from a speech delivered by Douglas Valentine at a 2010 peace conference. In expanded version is included as the final chapter of his book “The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World”.)

By Douglas Valentine

Source: Consortium News

The politics of terror are the greatest covert operation ever.

In explaining why, I’ll begin by defining some terms, because, when discussing the covert op called “the politics of terror,” words and their management are all important.

How are politics and terror actually defined: how are these meanings manipulated; for what purposes, and by whom?

Terrorism is defined as “violence against civilians intended to obtain a political purpose.”

This is an ambiguous phrase, which begs the questions: what are politics and violence?

Politics is defined as “the process by which groups of people make collective decisions.” And violence in this context is the use of force to compel a person or group to do or think something against their will. That includes the violence of words – of threatening to hurt – and of social structures, as well as the violence of deeds.

So, by definition, terrorism is political violence – hurting people, or threatening to hurt them, in order to make them govern themselves (or acquiesce to an external force) against their will.

In America, terrorism is always condemned by the government, and, accordingly, America is never a perpetrator of terrorism, but always the victims of it.

The U.S. war on terror is the ultimate expression of this principle: it is a military response to terrorism; violence in self-defense, not (ostensibly) violence for a political purpose.

That’s the official story – the assumption. But I’m going to show that America does engage in terrorism – violence against civilians for political purposes. This “state” terrorism, however, is covert, in so far as it is equated with national security, and thanks to that built-in ambiguity, it has both stated and unstated purpose.

The State and Unstated Policy in America

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. But who really makes the overarching political decisions in America? Who governs us?

The two political parties represent the people and they compete for control of the government. Historically, Republicans have generally favored business and Democrats have favored labor. The political division is, generally, class based.

Now, the government can be controlled by either political party; but the state endures – “the state” being the nation’s indispensable industries and infrastructure (banking, auto industry, insurance, Microsoft), and the institutions which defend the nation’s enduring interests: the military, law enforcement, the intelligence and security services.

In Europe they often, cynically, refer to the state as “industry” or Big Business. In America we tend to call “the state” the Establishment – an ambiguous word that needs to be defined.

The dictionary defines Establishment as, “An exclusive group of powerful people who rule a government or society by means of private agreements and decisions.”

I would venture to say that the interests of the state and the Establishment are the same, and that the definition of Establishment with a capital E is the pivotal phrase in discussing “state” terrorism.

Consider this: there is the politics of the two parties vying for control of the government, and there is the Establishment, the state, making the covert (ostensibly non-political) decisions that effectively govern America.

Many of those covert decisions concern national security: they are unstated policy.

Moreover, these covert policy decisions about national security are made by people who control the military, law enforcement, and intelligence and security services. These guardians of “the state” are collectively called the National Security Establishment.

Like the Establishment that secretly rules the “state,” the National Security Establishment is an exclusive group that is not accountable to the political whims of the people.

These professional guardians of the state – the Establishment – are assumed to be above partisan politics. Their loyalty is assumed to be to the law or national security. And that assumption is the Big Lie upon which state terrorism is based.

Yes, it is true that the National Security Establishment is not accountable to the people: and, in fact, it has built a series of ever-larger, concentric moats around itself called the National Security State, precisely to keep the people out of its business.

The National Security Establishment rules the National Security State, with an iron fist, but it is pure propaganda that the National Security Establishment and State are not political.

In order to get inside the National Security Establishment, and rise to a position of authority within it, one must be born there (like Bush or make billions like Bill Gates), or submit to years of right-wing political indoctrination calibrated to a series of increasingly restrictive security clearances.

Political indoctrination – adopting the correct right-wing ideology – and security clearances represent the drawbridge across the moats.

The National Security State is the covert social structure of the Establishment, and it has as its job not just defending the Establishment from foreign enemies, but also expanding the Establishment’s economic and military influence abroad, while preserving its class prerogatives at home.

By “class prerogatives,” I mean the National Security State is designed to keep the lower class from exerting any political control over the state; especially, redistributing the Establishment’s private wealth.

To these unstated ends – imperialism abroad and repression at home – the National Security State engages in terrorism – i.e. political violence – on behalf of the Establishment.

Indeed, the National Security State is political violence, terrorism, in its purest form.

The Establishment and its National Security State as Terrorism

The lower classes in America have little voice in making government or state policy. Some members of the lower classes have given up hope, others are content: but in either case, voter turnout is a mere 54 percent.

Whether hopeless or content, they know they cannot fight conventional thinking. For example, when the Establishment exerts its influence, it is not considered politics; it is simply the status quo. The rich create jobs and must be accommodated with trillion-dollar bailouts, paid for by workers taking furloughs.

That’s just the way it is. Politicians in the service of the Establishment, for over-arching reasons of national security, have to keep the capitalist financial system afloat.

It is the same thing with the National Security Establishment: America invaded Iraq, and there was nothing the people could do about it. The decision was made for them. Peace activists, least of all, had no voice in the decision, because they are assumed to have no stake in national security.

You will not find peace activists in the National Security Establishment; and that political repression is part of covert state terrorism.

Likewise, if labor seeks to exercise influence, its efforts are described as exploiting the state for more than it deserves, because it does not have an enduring stake in the state.

It is a fact: only Establishment wealth – ownership – is equated with national security.

Consider the immortal words of Leona Helmsley: “Only the little people pay taxes.”

That injustice in the tax code is political repression and, in so far as it makes the people fearful, it is state terrorism. The Establishment fears losing its loopholes, while workers and the poor fear losing their homes: two types of fear, one for each class, one stated, one unstated.

The Establishment engages imperialism and political repression through propaganda (word management violence) and social structures. This state terrorism also is unstated, covert.

Only when the people rebel and challenge the Establishment is the word terrorism applied.

Likewise, the military, police or intelligence actions that provoke rebellion, or the responses to rebellion, are never called terrorism: they are national security.

And that’s how the management of words helps to repress the lower classes.

Language and the Psychology of State Terror

America’s industrial-sized war machine was never said to terrorize Iraq; the invasion was not political because the war machine is owned by the Establishment.

The Establishment profiting from war is not politics; it is ideological neutral “profits.”

In fact, America exerts its unwanted political influence overseas, through the state terror of aircraft carrier fleets, bombers, nuclear subs, shock and awe invasions, pacification programs, the overthrow of governments, and support of repressive puppet regimes.

This state terrorism, which you never hear about, is the biggest covert psychological warfare operation of all time.

This psywar operation depends on narrowly defining terrorism as a suicide bomber, a hijacked plane, the decapitated body of a collaborator: the “selective terrorism” of rebels and nationalists who, outgunned and outlawed in their own country, have no other options, other than submission.

The purpose of this “selective terrorism” by rebels is psychological: to isolate collaborators, while demonstrating to the people the ability of the rebels to strike at their oppressors. Brutal pacification campaigns – state terrorism – prevent people from making a living. Selective terrorism does not.

That’s a big, meaningful “class” difference.

The National Security Establishment understands that selective terror achieves political and psychological goals that state terror does not – that it rallies people to revolutionary ideals. So the National Security Establishment engages in selective terror, too, by targeting the rebel, his family and friends in their homes.

This is the selective terror conducted by counter-terrorists. But don’t be confused: it is terrorism. All terrorism is psychological and political; state terror seeks to immobilize people and make them submissive, apathetic and/or ostensibly “content.”

The National Security Establishment fully understands that once people have been terrorized, they have been politically defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.

As former Director of Central Intelligence William Colby once said: “The implication or latent threat of terror was sufficient to insure that the people would comply.”

This principle of the psychological use of “the implication or latent threat of terror” is what brings us back to America and the business of terror.

The Business of Terror

State terror – colonization abroad and political repression at home – is a key means of extracting profits and maintaining ownership of property. Ask the American Indian.

In its colonies abroad, the U.S. engages in state terrorism by removing all legal protections for rebels; detention, torture, and summary execution are the price for rebellion against U.S. policy.

State terrorism overseas, imperialism, is never acknowledged by the U.S. media, because the media is a big business closely affiliated with the National Security Establishment; indeed, two of the major networks are owned by defense contractors.

And state terrorism applied domestically to ensure “internal” security is never acknowledged. But the National Security State is well thought out, by professionals in language management, and political and psychological warfare, aimed at you.

“Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance,” says Johan Galtung, a founder of the disciipline of peace and conflict studies. But he adds “structural violence is the tool of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses guns; the professional uses social structure. The legal criminality of the social system and its institutions, of government…is tacit violence. Structural violence is a structure of exploitation and social injustice.”

As Colby said: “The implication or latent threat is enough to insure people will comply.”

The war on terror and its domestic version “homeland security” are the law of the land – America’s new legally criminal social structure based on administrative detention, enshrined in The Patriot Act and a number of executive orders, some secret.

This lack of due process comes on top of a justice system already skewed to protect the propertied elite and pack the prisons with the poor, through “structural violence,” mainly the drug wars.

The Establishment’s new anti-terror and anti-drug laws make the National Security State the most fearsome covert political and psywar machine the world has ever seen. And the National Security State is growing: the “Top Secret America” series in the Washington Post put it at 750,000 cadres.

This secret state within a state extends into the homeland’s critical infrastructure and beyond. For example, the arms industry provides good jobs, making American imperial aggression seem a positive value.

And this is how the psyched-out people become one of the moats.

As it is modeled on the totalitarian corporate paradigm, the National Security State in all its manifestations fits the classic definition of a fascist dictatorship. And we know what its intentions are. They have been stated.

In the days after 9/11, right-wing Republican stalwart Kenneth W. Starr, the Clinton inquisitor, said the danger of terrorism requires “deference to the judgments of the political branches with respect to matters of national security.”

But is there an on-going emergency that requires deference to the political branches, meaning the right-wing ideologues who rule the National Security State? And what does it mean for Establishment opponents if due process is completely abandoned at home, and subjected to politics?

Michael Ledeen, a former counter-terror expert on Reagan’s National Security Council, blamed 9/11 on President Bill Clinton “for failing to properly organize our nation’s security apparatus.”

Ledeen’s solution to the problem of those who sneered at security was “to stamp out” the “corrupt habits of mind.” By which he means Liberalism.

In other words, the reactionary right-wing that owns the National Security State wants to impose its total rule on the people in order to create a security conscious, uniform citizenry – marching in lock step, flags waving – that is necessary to win the war on terror.

This is how the National Security professionals are incrementally creating the requisite fascist social structure – through terror, the best organizing principle ever.

“This is time for the old motto, ‘kill them all, let God sort ’em out.’ New times require new people with new standards,” Ledeen asserted. “The entire political world will understand it and applaud it. And it will give us a chance to prevail.”

When Ledeen says “political” world he means the “owners of the business” of state terror, the right-wing ideologues who pack the National Security State and the capitalist Establishment they serve.

And they have won the propaganda war, folks.

Orwell, Freud, and the Syrian Ruse

Posted on May 29, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Reality by other means

By Jason Hirthler

Source: Dissident Voice

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

— Karl Rove speaking to a small group of reporters at a cocktail party in 2004…… printed in the Washington Post

The adjective ‘Orwellian’ is so overused mostly because it is so incredibly apt on a daily basis. George Orwell’s basic concept reflects a simple tenet of propaganda: the thing you are hiding is often hid behind its exact opposite. Orwell expressed this concept in 1984 with the government slogans, “War is Peace,” “Ignorance is Strength,” and “Freedom is Slavery.” The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud evidently suggested something similar about human nature: that to discover our true human nature, we need merely to reverse society’s moral maxims: if a commandment forbids adultery, it’s because we want to commit it. In other words, for both Orwell and Freud, we often disguise what we are doing behind claims that we are doing the opposite. We aren’t committing adultery; we’re practicing fidelity. We aren’t precipitating war; we’re pressing for peace. We aren’t seeking our own self-interest; we’re doing it all for others.

When applied to U.S. propaganda, the formula is revealing. To discover what your government is hiding, just reverse the media narrative. If the papers all say Russia is an imperial aggressor, it’s likely because Washington is. If the news networks say that Assad is a murderous monster, it’s likely because the groups we’re backing are. If the mainstream says Communism is a dire threat, it’s likely because capitalism is a dire threat. All of these examples are demonstrably true.

What confuses many readers is the fact that the first premise–that Russia, Assad, and Communism are all threats–usually has an element of truth to it, though not to the degree that it is portrayed. And so intelligent propaganda doesn’t simply traffic in lies, but rather half-truths, distortions, and omissions that themselves further distort a narrative. It is this sophisticated blend of fact, fiction, hyperbole and omission that makes propaganda so difficult to unpack for the average reader, who has little time, inclination, and practice in deciphering state-directed doctrine.

Reversing Reality

If Freud was correct, then we tend to publicly deny our greatest desires when they run counter to prevailing morality, shielding our base wishes behind a curtain of rectitude, even as we quietly pursue them. The modern instances of this in government are boundless. Example: FISA legitimates the surveillance it was designed to deter. Example: Congress abets the executive it was created to check. Example: ‘Defense’ becomes the aggression it was devised to defend against. Example: Healthcare becomes a bureaucracy built on denial of care in the name of its provision. Example. Journalism: the adversarial role of the fourth estate, becomes the adversary of the truth it was intended to protect. Journalists transcribe the diktats of power. Like the senators that notarize the mandates of the executive. Like the federal agents that entrap citizens in order to protect them. Like the drones that destroy lives to save them. Like the citizens who signal liberal values in support of imperial conquerors. Like the social justice warriors who legislate the intolerance they seek to eradicate. It seems to be a socio-political reality that the forcible assertion of one value guarantees a renaissance of its antitheses. Or is it that we forcibly assert a moral value to disguise a flowering of vice?

The process of turning a story into its opposite is fairly straightforward. If the U.S. is aggressively violating human rights, it needs to be rewritten as a defender of human rights. What this means in practice is switching the roles each of the actors assume in the narrative. Heroes become villains; villains become heroes; and victims are either genuine victims or villains depicted as martyrs for a righteous cause. This requires a good bit of romanticizing your side, demonizing the enemy, and eulogizing the victims. And then, as the author of Mein Kampf recommended, keep it simple. Your side wants one thing: peace. Your enemy wants one thing: war. And the victims want one thing: freedom.

Exhibit A

Take Syria as a recent example. The media narrative states that the U.S. and its freedom-loving allies have cautiously backed a loose confederation of rebels who rose up against Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad in 2011. In actuality, the U.S. and its freedom-hating allies have incautiously backed a loose confederation of foreign terrorists who have been paid to overthrow the elected Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Only occasionally is the real backstory hinted at, which includes weakening Shia strongholds and destabilizing independent states in the region.

In turning the truth around to justify its war of aggression, the state and its supplicant media seized upon a handful of facts as the bedrock on which it constructed a false historical narrative. Which is what you’d expect from the Orwell-Freud model. And so…Are there elements of Syrian civil society that protested Assad in 2011? Absolutely. Are there actual Syrians fighting against Assad now? Sure. Are there elements of corruption and repression in Assad’s history? Definitely. But each of these truths are used to disguise the much larger facts of unmitigated U.S. aggression.

Upon this foundation, the typical narrative is constructed. The United States government is romanticized as a virtuous mediator concerned with supporting the freedom fighters and helping them achieve the freedoms they’ve yearned for. Assad is demonized as the autocratic mass murderer who repeatedly denies these freedoms, and tortures thousands before destroying the bodies. And the Syrian people, engine of the largest refugee crisis since World War Two, are shown as the valiant victims of the war, particularly in Aleppo, where the destruction of the city in an attempt to uproot the terrorist army is leveraged to milk as much emotional content from the war as possible and to further cement Assad’s reputation as a moral monster.

The MSM didn’t stop there. It followed with a series of attempts to further demonize Assad. A massive cache of photos purportedly detailing “regime” torture. This cache was delivered from somebody named “Caesar,” a defector not unlike the fake defector, “Curveball” from the run-up to the Iraq War. Twice false flags have been utilized to claim that the evil optometrist in Damascus has in a fit of pique demanded that innocent Syrians be sprayed with chemical weapons. Now a “crematorium” where Assad supposedly cremates all the Syrian citizens he is slaughtering (supposedly because he hates humanity so much). It doesn’t particularly matter if these stories eventually unravel when evidence is shown to be lacking. The damage is done to the psyche of readers and listeners, who absorb the media reports with the uncritical acceptance of animals entering an abattoir.

The takfiri mercenaries brought in by the West to topple Assad are likewise romanticized by the press. Instead of labeling the terrorists we backed as extremists, the New York Times peddled a story that they were moderates. Beheading of children, tossing gays from rooftops, using citizens as human shields, staging rescue operations, and many other atrocities failed to prevent the media from intransigently pushing this storyline.

No Quick Fix

As you can see, there is no shortage of opportunities to apply the Orwellian label to modern reportage. That said, I’m not suggesting that the authors at The New York Times and the Washington Post are all conniving propagandists consciously preparing deceitful reportage. For every Edward Bernays, there are a dozen Brian Williams. Often, they have simply internalized the values of the institution that employs them. They recognize, perhaps consciously or subconsciously, that their careers depend on their willingness to follow a particular narrative. And they make their choice, rationalizing themselves into a clean conscience.

Which is no surprise. The human species could give a master class in self-deception. And there are psychological needs that appear more urgent for us than truth. Namely, the need to feel good about oneself and believe in one’s tribe. Set aside the need to situate the world in a comprehensible narrative, the need to fit in with one’s peer group, and the need to do meaningful work and self-actualize in society. The point is that all of these needs are undermined by the counter-narratives of the left. Counter-narratives destabilize our cleanly delineated understanding of the world; they often ostracize us from our peer group; and they threaten our ability to contribute to society in a manner approved of by society (i.e., generally contributing to the machinery of consumerism). Who has time for a reconstruction of one’s worldview, especially if it might lead to social alienation? This is why just throwing facts at heavily propagandized people doesn’t often work. There are other forces in play, which may remind us that politics is often little more than a value signaling device for human beings.

So most of us, whatever inklings we may receive of an alternative reality, will settle for doing nothing untoward, recusing ourselves from political debates, and hewing as closely to inoffensive blandishments in our speech as we can. (The only other major path is to adopt the ideologically bankrupt cop-out of lesser evilism and rant about how horrible the other party is. This provides the frisson of feeling at one with the herd, but does nothing to improve society.) In other words, we shackle ourselves to political groupthink and play the role of the conscientious centrist like any good straight man would. We have no time for the revolutionary urgency of the disenfranchised. It was Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who argued that people don’t want intellectual freedom, but rather to be told what to believe. Only then will they be happy. Otherwise, we ruin our peace of mind through choice paralysis or some variety of existential angst, or through a lack of religious faith that leaves us with no guiding myth to sustain us. Given all these apolitical factors that inform whether or not one challenges the received narrative, is it any surprise that mental slavery and ignorance are as prevalent today as in Orwell’s time?

Non-Alignment and Dissent to Challenge US-Russia-China’s New World Order

Posted on May 26, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Gilbert Mercier

(News Junkie Post)

In groups of people there are always bullies who feel entitled, for no particular reason, to want more than the rest and to dominate the others in complete disregard of the common good. Fortunately for convivial people, bullies tend to have the psychological subtlety of dominant male gorillas who beat loudly on their chests and fight over food and females. Therefore bullies often annihilate each other. The more serious social problems occur when they collaborate to gang up on others. A primal impulse to dominate is the motivation for the insatiable quest for wealth and power, and it is a curse of the human condition. Altruism and the common global good are not why big world powers like the United States, Russia and China try to impose their rule on smaller countries; raw geopolitical dominance is the reason, and this is similar to the British, French and Spanish imperial-colonial era when countries were arbitrarily determined on maps drawn in London, Paris or Madrid. Our challenge is to break away, as countries and individuals, from the cynical and degrading notion, “to the victor belongs the spoils,” which seems to govern most behaviors. Our esteemed colleague Dady Chery initiated this important discussion in her essay, “Other People’s Countries.” To extract ourselves from the despair of corporate neocolonialism, courtesy of what looks like a new grand-bargaining era between the US, Russia and China, where other nations’ resources are assigned to spheres of influences, a two-fold solution should be considered: first, revamp the nonaligned movement (NAM); second, mount a concerted and systematic dissent, and ultimately a worldwide rebellion, against the global ruling elite apparatus.

Nonaligned movement redux

The nonaligned movement has to be understood in the context of the cold war. Even though most leaders of its founding nations were Marxists or neo-Marxists, the movement was clearly an effort to curtail the influence of the Soviet Union. The NAM officially started in Belgrade in 1961. It was founded by Tito, Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno, and Nkrumah, then the respective leaders of Yugoslavia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Ghana. The intention was for those countries, in joining forces with each other, to distance themselves from the spheres of influence of both the US and USSR. The nonaligned doctrine was probably best defined by a champion of the movement, Fidel Castro, who said that the organization’s goal was to guarantee “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of non-aligned countries in their struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great powers.”

The NAM still exists and includes 120 members, but it has largely lost its impact and forgotten its core ideology of presenting a united front against the dominant economic powers or permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). One can easily argue that the creation of BRICS, which includes the superpowers Russia and China, in addition to Brazil, India and South Africa, has helped to undermine the NAM. The reality that all NAM nations should consider from the recent events in Syria and North Korea, is that a triumvirate deal was apparently reached despite some unconvincing rhetoric of outrage, and that Russia and China, respectively, can throw their allies unceremoniously under the proverbial bus. One can easily speculate that Iran and Venezuela, both targets for regime-change by Washington, have learned their lesson and seriously doubt that Moscow and Beijing would valiantly rescue them from US attack.

US-Russia-China: corporate imperialism’s new world order

The Alternative Right in the West fancies itself as being nationalist and therefore anti-globalist. Its discourse is so sketchy and inarticulate, however, that it fails to acknowledge that one cannot be anti-globalist without also being anti-capitalist. Capitalism, and especially supra-national capitalism, is a problem that the AltRight movement seems unable to identify. In the ideological fog of the nationalist right, globalism is wrongly identified as being a leftist notion. After a succession of meaningless palace intrigues, the incidental tenant of the White House has become an empty suit tailored from the flag of corporate imperialism. Gone are the vague populist promises of less US interventionism. A father-figure to represent the common man, a mad-dog general, and an oil-man diplomat have been given carte blanche by the military-industrial complex.

What deals were made with Russia to greenlight the April 7, 2017 US missile strike in Syria? Could it have been: if you promise to lift the economic sanctions, we’ll let you bomb Bashar al-Assad to boost Trump in the polls and, to sweeten the deal, Exxon will get favored treatment in Russian oil-extraction ventures. The US no longer philosophically clashes with China and Russia. Despite their communist heritage, the latter have more or less scrapped any remotely Marxist principle from their governing ideology. Just like in the West, Russia and China have their class of oligarchs. As long as all the world’s elite agree on how to carve the global pie, there’s no reason to fight. In recent weeks, the number of inquiries about World War III have skyrocketed on search engines worldwide. Is the fear justified or is this a psychological operation to force people into despair and submission? Would China retaliate against the US, Japan and South Korea if the US would break the taboo of using a nuclear bomb against China’s ally North Korea, or would Russia risk World War III in case of a joint attack against Iran by the US and Israel? Probably not.

The virtue of dissent and rebellion

Superpowers tend to call independent nations “rogue.” This is the spirit of nonalignment. Once in a while, a small nation like Cuba or Vietnam dares to give an imperialist geopolitical bully like Spain, the US, Japan, or France a bloody nose. Bullies fear even the slightest resistance. The little guy does have a chance, against all odds. Oppression can be overcome. The fear of war, and continuously fabricated threat of terrorism in everybody’s daily life, is a good way for government to get a society to accept policing and militarization, and continue to feed the voracious beast that is the global military-industrial complex. The state and corporate controlled media’s various flavors of propaganda serve only to induce passivity and the acceptance of a brutal world order. These can only be overcome with dissent, global rebellion and the refusal to become shadows of what we once were; the refusal to become humans without basic decency, self respect and love for our neighbors; the refusal to become humans without quality; the refusal to settle for survival in a cannibalistic world order.

Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photograph one by Thomas Ricker; photograph two from the archive of Zeinab Mohamed; composites three and five by Mark Rain; photograph four by David Shankbone; composite six by New 1lluminati; and photograph seven by Joe Brusky.

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