The Democrats Are Now the War Party

Posted on by
2

The Democratic Party has become the party of permanent war, fueling massive military spending which is hollowing out the country from the inside and flirting with nuclear war.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost.com

The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested. 

The historian Arnold Toynbee cited unchecked militarism as the fatal disease of empires, arguing that they ultimately commit suicide. 

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement. When 30 members of the party’s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib voted present. 

The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military — the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war. 

This lust for war is dangerous, pushing us into a potential war with Russia and, perhaps later, with China — each a nuclear power. It is also economically ruinous. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. Congress is also on track to provide an extra $21.7 billion to the Pentagon — above the already expanded annual budget — to resupply Ukraine.

“But those contracts are just the leading edge of what is shaping up to be a big new defense buildup,” The New York Times reported. “Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II — a level that is more than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined.”

The Democratic Party, which, under the Clinton administration aggressively courted corporate donors, has surrendered its willingness to challenge, however tepidly, the war industry. 

“As soon as the Democratic Party made a determination, it could have been 35 or 40 years ago, that they were going to take corporate contributions, that wiped out any distinction between the two parties,” Dennis Kucinich said when I interviewed him on my show for The Real News Network. “Because in Washington, he or she who pays the piper plays the tune. That’s what’s happened. There isn’t that much of a difference in terms of the two parties when it comes to war.”

In his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine,” Fulbright describes how the Pentagon and the arms industry pour millions into shaping public opinion through public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, control over Hollywood and domination of the commercial media. Military analysts on cable news are universally former military and intelligence officials who sit on boards or work as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News, was also an employee of Defense Solutions, a military sales and project management firm. He, like most of these shills for war, personally profited from the sales of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the eve of every congressional vote on the Pentagon budget, lobbyists from businesses tied to the war industry meet with Congress members and their staff to push them to vote for the budget to protect jobs in their district or state. This pressure, coupled with the mantra amplified by the media that opposition to profligate war funding is unpatriotic, keeps elected officials in bondage. These politicians also depend on the lavish donations from the weapons manufacturers to fund their campaigns.

Seymour Melman, in his book “Pentagon Capitalism,” documented the way militarized societies destroy their domestic economies. Billions are spent on the research and development of weapons systems while renewable energy technologies languish. Universities are flooded with military-related grants while they struggle to find money for environmental studies and the humanities. Bridges, roads, levees, rail, ports, electric grids, sewage treatment plants and drinking water infrastructures are structurally deficient and antiquated. Schools are in disrepair and lack sufficient teachers and staff. Unable to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, the for-profit health care industry forces families, including those with insurance, into bankruptcy. Domestic manufacturing, especially with the offshoring of jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other nations, collapses. Families are drowning in personal debt, with 63 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. 

Melman, who coined the term “permanent war economy,” noted that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its discretionary budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is nothing more than gilded corporate welfare. Military systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are guaranteed. For example, this November, the Army awarded Raytheon Technologies alone more than $2 billion in contracts, on top of over $190 million awarded in August, to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons sent to Ukraine. Despite a depressed market for most other businesses, stock prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have risen by more than 36 and 50 percent this year. 

Tech giants, including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to the police and FBI, have been absorbed into the permanent war economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were awarded multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and are eligible to receive $9 billion in Pentagon contracts to provide the military with “globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” through mid-2028.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Israel, with more than $150 billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, or Egypt, which has received over $80 billion since 1978 — aid that requires foreign governments to buy weapons systems from the U.S. The U.S. public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and purchases them for foreign governments. Such a  circular system mocks the idea of a free-market economy. These weapons soon become obsolete and are replaced by updated and usually more costly weapons systems. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

“The truth of the matter is that we’re in a heavily militarized society driven by greed, lust for profit, and wars are being created just to keep fueling that,” Kucinich told me.

In 2014, the U.S. backed a coup in Ukraine that installed a government that included neo-Nazis and was antagonistic to Russia. The coup triggered a civil war when the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, the Donbass, sought to secede from the country, resulting in over 14,000 people dead and nearly 150,000 displaced, before Russia invaded in February. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Jacques Baud, a former NATO security advisor who also worked for Swiss intelligence, was instigated by the escalation of Ukraine’s war on the Donbass. It also followed the Biden administration’s rejection of proposals sent by the Kremlin in late 2021, which might have averted Russia’s invasion the following year. 

This invasion has led to widespread U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia, which have boomeranged onto Europe. Inflation ravages Europe with the sharp curtailment of shipments of Russian oil and gas. Industry, especially in Germany, is crippled.  In most of Europe, it is a winter of shortages, spiraling prices and misery. 

“This whole thing is blowing up in the face of the West,” Kucinich warned. “We forced Russia to pivot to Asia, as well as Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. There’s a whole new world being formed. The catalyst of it is the misjudgment that occurred about Ukraine and the effort to try to control Ukraine in 2014 that most people aren’t aware of.”

By not opposing a Democratic Party whose primary business is war, liberals become the sterile, defeated dreamers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.” 

A former convict, Dostoevsky did not fear evil. He feared a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront evil. And war, to steal a line from my latest book, is the greatest evil.

Our Authentically Fake and Hypocritical Society of Copies

Posted on by
1

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Ditto,” said Tweedledum.
“Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.
– Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass

Sometimes a trifling contretemps can open a window onto significant issues.

As a case in point, The New York Times, a newspaper that regularly publishes U.S. propaganda without a bit of shame or remorse, recently reported on a controversy involving Simon & Schuster and Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. The report with the same information was repeated across the media.

The publishing company had offered limited-edition, authenticated, hand-signed copies of the book for $600 each.  Nine Hundred collectors and die-hard fans bought a copy, many, no doubt, caught in hero worship and the thought that a Dylan-penned signature would grant them a bit of his fame through the touch of his hand upon their lives.

The quest for immortality takes many forms, and the laying on of hands, even when done remotely through a signature, has long been a popular form of sleight-of-hand.

I once shook hands with an Elvis hologram impersonator and the thrill vibrated for days.

But these Dylan aficionados noticed something strange about the signatures: They didn’t seem to be actual signatures individually written with a pen by Dylan. As anyone knows from their own handwriting, no two signatures are the same, since the human hand is not a copy machine.  These signatures were identical.

It turned out that those who smelled a deception were right.  Under pressure from astute purchasers, Simon & Schuster had to come clean – sort of.  They offered to refund all purchasers for the deception. They released the following statement:

To those who purchased The Philosophy of Modern Song limited edition, we want to apologize. As it turns out, the limited editions books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form. We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.

This statement is a perfect example of double-talk, and more.

Then Dylan also apologized, saying that he used an auto-pen since he was suffering from vertigo and “during the pandemic, it was impossible to sign anything and the vertigo didn’t help.”  His apology seems sincere compared to the publisher’s double-talk, but then again, so did his signatures.  And the controversy has spread to the limited edition prints of his artwork.

“Limited edition prints” – a deception in itself, as if limiting the number of copies of an original painting makes them more original.  Ten dittos instead of eleven.

However, I am not primarily concerned with the nuances of this tempest in a teapot, which might disappear as fast as yesterday’s bluster, or it may forever tarnish Dylan’s reputation, which would be a shame if it also damaged the genuine greatness of his songs.

I would like to focus on the following matters that I have seen through its window: language usage, a society of copies, reading texts closely, and the degradation of literacy, all of which are tangled together with non-stop government propaganda disseminated by the corporate mass media to form a major social issue.

First, language.  Note in the Simon & Schuster apology the words: “As it turns out, the limited editions books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form.”  This is a clear deception twice over.  The books do not contain original signatures; they contain machine copies of it.  Phrasing it that way allows the company to plead innocent while also apologizing for its innocence as if they consider themselves guilty.  What exactly are they saying they are apologizing for?  Deceptions dittoed?

And the phrase “As it turns out,” implies that Simon & Schuster was surprised that the signatures were machine generated, which is highly improbable.  It also suggests they are not responsible; such verbiage approximates the common, passive introductory phrase “it so happens” or the equally non-literate “hopefully” to begin a sentence.

“It so happens” that I am writing these words and “it so happens” that you are reading them…as if we are victims of our own free choices.  Passive language for victims of fate who have learned to write and talk this way to avoid responsibility even for their own hope, as in: “I hope.”  Or maybe the widespread copycat use of “hopefully” is an unconscious attempt to deny pervasive hopelessness.  No matter how many times you repeat something doesn’t make it true.

The use of such language is a reflection of an age in which determinism has for decades been repeatedly promulgated to extinguish people’s belief in freedom.  Ditto: Saying “the exact same” doesn’t make the same more same through redundancy.  You can’t get any more same than same since same means identical, or any more opposite than opposite even if you say “the exact opposite.”  The English language is suffering.

To top it off, an esteemed book publishing company nearly a century old concludes with a sentence that a high school freshman – circa 1960 before all the dumbing-down of schooling – would realize was redundant with the words “immediately” (misplaced) and “immediate,” as if repetition would emphasize their contrition. “We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.”  Ditto.

But who notices these things?

Discerning readers – whether of the examples above or of a subtle controlled- opposition media article suggesting one thing while meaning another – are becoming rarer and rarer. Ideology, political party allegiances, and plain stupidity block many from grasping propaganda and media claims made out of thin air.

Anonymous sources, subtle phrasing, real or imagined intelligence sources, the use of words such as may, might, possible, could be, etc., are a staple of so much writing and broadcast news that they fly by people used to the speed of the digital life with texting and internet browsing where repetition and copying are king.  Yes, speed kills in so many ways.  The repetition of talking points across the major corporate media, something carefully studied and confirmed years ago, has become so obvious to anyone who chooses to take the time to investigate.  It’s not hard to do but few bother; they are too “busy.”  Thus propaganda and gibberish pass unnoticed.

Just as “The Real McCoy” (see the opening “Refrain” of Hillel Schwartz’ The Culture of the Copy) was a fake and the phrase came to represent the genuine to supposedly confirm authenticity, we are now living in an era of the counterfeit everywhere. Counterfeits of counterfeits.  Imposters.  Actors playing actors. Counterfeit traitors. Fabricated reality and copies of copies.  Ditto.  Ditto.  Ditto.  Lies about not lying.  (See The New York Times’, The Guardian’s, etc. deceptive, hypocritical, and self-serving joint letter asking the U.S government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.)

The Dylan controversy is a very minor example of a major issue that is little appreciated for its devastating impact on society.

For another minor example, we may ask how many times does one have to see the replay of Christian Pulisic’s recent goal against Iran in the 2022 World Cup to grasp its brilliance and to see that he was injured?  Two, three, five, ten?  And this is a sporting event, not some mall shooting or serious issue of war.  In a digital high-tech world repetition is the norm.  What does repetition do to the mind?

What does repetition do to the mind?

Despite the great sportsmanship shown by the players from both the U.S. and Iran on the pitch, U.S. Men’s Soccer executives, by deleting the Islamic Republic emblem from Iran’s flag on its social media sites, and the U.S. media tried repeatedly to politicize the game into a battle between the good Americans and the evil Iranians, even while a U.S. regime change color revolution was being attempted on the streets of Iran.

What does repetitious propaganda do to the mind?

Technology has not just allowed for machine signatures but has made us in many ways machine people who need to be hammered over the head time and again – and to like it. To go back again and again for more.  Everything but life has become repeatable.

Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby’s reply to Nick’s statement In The Great Gatsby – “You can’t repeat the past,” Nick tells Gatsby, who responds, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, off course you can!” – perfectly captures the “reality” of a digital screen culture of illusions in which many people have unconsciously come to believe that you can instantly replay life as well.

Indeed, to make people into machines is the goal of trans-humanists Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset and the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda. Artificial intelligence (AI) for artificial people.  While there are innocent examples of repetition, the use of it is a fundamental tactic of propaganda, whether that be through words or images. And we are drowning in repeated media/government propaganda about the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine, Covid19, Iran, China, Syria, etc.

It’s as easy as pie to innocently repeat, as I learned recently when my wife asked me to use her cell phone to take a photograph. Bumpkin that I am who despises these machines, rather than briefly hitting the button I held it down for a few seconds and took the same photo 67 ½ times.  It just so happened.

But the propagandists’ repetitions are no accident.  You can’t condemn Julian Assange year after year for posting U.S. war crimes – the Afghanistan War Logs – and then try to save your own ass after the man has been persecuted for more than a decade and counting.  The media who did this and then wrote the recent letter are counterfeit traitors to the truth and agents of the war criminals.  To call them journalists is to misuse language: They are imposters.

What does repetition do to the mind? asked Tweedledum to his identical twin Tweedledee.

Tweedledee replied, Look what it’s done to us.

Saturday Matinee: Trailer Wars

Posted on by
Reply

By Sam Prime

Source: Alamo Drafthouse

Unleashed from the vaults of Austin’s American Genre Film Archive, we present a meticulously-curated selection of the best, strangest, and most amazing coming attraction trailers in the world! Most have never been available in any home format, and all are presented in TRAILER WAR!

From the high flying, explosive metal mayhem of STUNT ROCK to THUNDER COPS’ disembodied flying head chaos, each 3 minute masterpiece is like a beckoning portal to another, more exciting dimension. It’s a crippling overdose of towering flames, mechanized destruction, lurking fear, poor sexual choices and spiritual devastation on an apocalyptic scale. You might want to have a cornea donor standing by just in case…because THIS IS GOING TO BURN!

Presented in collaboration with the American Genre Film Archive, with additional support from Drafthouse Films, we look forward to sharing this evening of eye-popping, gut-punching glory with you!

____________________

Watch Trailer War on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/15503471

The Twitter Files reveal influence of Russiagate disinformation

Posted on by
2

The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story shows how the Russian boogeyman is wielded to serve political goals and bury inconvenient facts.

(Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Since 2016, US audiences have been flooded with claims that Russia has waged a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign to influence them, and that Donald Trump and a bottomless cast of associates were somehow complicit.

No “scandal” in US history has yielded such a lengthy rap sheet of falsehoods, debunkings, and retractions. The Mueller investigation and parallel Congressional inquiries found no evidence for the all-consuming theories of a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy. Allegations of Russian government email hacking and social media operations are equally dubious, most notably on the foundational allegation that Russian intelligence stole Democratic Party emails and gave them to Wikileaks.

Even if we were to ignore the evidentiary gaps and accept each assertion about “Russian interference” at face value, the totality could in no way justify even a shred of the multi-year Russia-mania. With no shame and without end, prominent political and media voices have imbued Russian bots, memes, and hackers — real or imagined — with the power to “sow chaos” in US society, swing election results, and even become worthy of comparison to the attacks of Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

Given the Iraq WMD-esque preponderance of hyperbole and outright lies in the incessant claims of Russian subterfuge, it is reasonable to conclude that the US intelligence officials and political-media actors who have spread them are waging exactly what they accuse Russia of: a politically motivated disinformation campaign aimed at influencing the general public.

The newly disclosed Twitter Files — a cache of internal communications from the social media giant — offer new evidence of one of the Russiagate disinformation campaign’s core functions: protecting the rule of domestic elites, particularly in the Democratic Party.

In two consecutive presidential elections, the Russian boogeyman has been invoked to stigmatize and silence reporting on the Democratic candidate. It began in 2016, when journalists who reported on the stolen DNC emails’ revelations about Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street speeches or the DNC’s bias against Bernie Sanders were blamed for Trump’s victory and deemed to be unwitting Kremlin dupes promoting “disinformation” – in reality, factual material that embarrassed the pre-ordained winner.

Four years later, that same playbook was deployed for Clinton’s successor at the top of Democratic ticket, Joe Biden. In the weeks before the November 2020 election, Twitter and Facebook censored the New York Post’s reporting about the contents Hunter Biden’s laptop on the grounds that the computer material could be “Russian disinformation.” The Post’s stories detailed how Hunter Biden traded on his family name to secure lucrative business abroad, and raised questions about Joe Biden’s denials of any involvement.

The US media responded to the suppression of the laptop story with indifference or even approval. In one notable case, Glenn Greenwald resigned from the outlet that he co-founded, The Intercept, after its editors attempted to censor his coverage of the laptop controversy. Even stories that had long been public — such as the unqualified Hunter receiving an $80,000-per-month Burisma board seat just months after his father’s administration helped overthrow Ukraine’s government – were effectively off-limits.

There was never a shred of evidence that Russia was behind the laptop story, but that was of no consequence. Dutiful media editors, reporters, and pundits took their cues from a group of more than 50 former intelligence officials, who issued a statement declaring that the Hunter Biden laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

These intelligence veterans’ claim was in fact a classic Russiagate disinformation operation, as the Twitter files newly underscore.

Hollywood and it’s Useful Idiots: Propaganda for the War in Ukraine, Big Pharma, and Every Other Globalist Agenda

Posted on by
5

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Alistair Cooke, a British-born writer who became a BBC film critic early in his career who worked mainly in the United States as a journalist, television personality, radio broadcaster had expressed his honest point of view on Hollywood’s film industry when he said that “I believe that Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.” Since World War II, Hollywood has been one of the main instruments of propaganda for globalist agendas. It began with US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt who established the US Office of War Information (OWI) from June 1942 until September 1945 whose job was to regulate newspapers, radio broadcasts, Hollywood films and all other forms of media in order to propagandize the public in an effort to gain support for America’s involvement in the war. The OWI launched a global propaganda campaign that oversaw revisions in collaboration with Hollywood producers, and at times, even rejected film scripts that portrayed the US as a negative force on the world stage.  The OWI’s main job was to reject any film that had anti-war material.  There was also the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) which was a division under the OWI that worked with Hollywood executives to decide which movies could benefit the war effort, for example, it authorized several films that had anti-Japanese propaganda, sort of like todays anti-Russia propaganda you find in many Hollywood films. However, over the last 20 years or so, Hollywood propaganda has even become even worse with the help of its Hollywood celebrities who have become mouthpieces for globalist agendas, so let’s call them for what they really are, ‘Useful Idiots.’

It’s amazing that for the last couple of decades many Hollywood celebrities have become self-described experts and spokespeople for US wars, Big Pharma, climate change and other globalist agendas.  Hollywood celebrities act and sing for a living, wear expensive name-brand clothing, and in some cases exploit their children to be part of the new woke culture. The so-called “Hollywood activists” such as George Clooney, U2 lead singer Bono, and the rest of them are phony as they can be. However, in all fairness, there are a handful of celebrities who do not, in any way fall into that category including Mel Gibson who is outspoken critic on Jewish power in Hollywood, comedian and actor George Carlin (R.I.P.), Marlon Brando, John Lennon (R.I.P.) and a handful of others.  When it comes to Israeli occupation and genocide against the Palestinians, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, singer-songwriter and composer Roger Waters, Natalie Portman, and actress Vanessa Redgrave come to mind. In 1978, Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for best supporting actress in the film ‘Julia’ gave an acceptance speech at the 50th Academy Awards which she denounced Israel’s war against the Palestinians.  Redgrave said that “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world.”  The British actress had claimed in the past that far-right Jewish Defense League targeted her for producing the 1977 documentary ‘The Palestinian’. 

Most Hollywood celebrities who toe the line will do and say anything to remain relevant in the film and television industries, so they also follow the mainstream media narratives or listen to their Hollywood bosses, or maybe they are just dumbed-down individuals, just ask outspoken actor and comedian Ricky Gervais who had an iconic opening monologue in the Golden Globe awards ceremony in 2020 that will be remembered for the ages:

So, if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and fuck off, OK? It’s already three hours long. Right, let’s do the first award

Sean Penn and Ben Stiller: War against Russia

Although talented, two of the most idiotic actors in Hollywood when it comes to the war in Ukraine is Sean Penn and Ben Stiller.  Last month, Sean Penn recently visited and lent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky his Oscar while Zelensky awarded Penn the Order of Merit honor because he is “doing everything to help us gather international support” according to Reuters.  The article ‘Sean Penn visits Ukraine’s Zelensky, loans him an Oscar’ stated that “Hollywood actor and director Sean Penn, sanctioned by Russia for criticizing its war in Ukraine, loaned his Oscar statuette to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a visit to Kyiv on Tuesday.” 

The other actor is Ben Stiller who played an idiotic model in Zoolander and many other films called Zelensky his hero.  According to NBC News ‘Ben Stiller meets with Zelenskyy in Kyiv, tells Ukrainian leader ‘You’re my hero’ said that “The comedy star praised the Ukrainian president — himself a former comedian and actor — as a hero during the meeting, telling him: “You’re amazing” and that “It’s a great honor for me,” Stiller, who was appointed a UNHCR goodwill ambassador in July 2018, said in video capturing the meeting. “It’s really wonderful, you’re my hero. You’re amazing.”  So Stiller jumps on the Zelensky bandwagon just like most of his Hollywood friends to help the Western narrative that the war in Ukraine is about “freedom and democracy.”

But I want to go back to Sean Penn and his incredible hypocrisy when it comes to US wars and regime change.  In 2011, US President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gave US forces and NATO the greenlight to remove Libyan President, Muammar Gaddafi from power which destroyed Libya in the process.  Here is the interview with Sean Penn on CNN on his claim that it was all Gaddafi’s fault:

Obviously, the war on Libya was run by the Democratic Party so for Penn it was justified.  Now here is Sean Penn questioning the Bush Administration on WMDs in Iraq on December 15th, 2002.  The war on Iraq was basically a Republican Party affair under the Bush neocons:

Sean Penn’s hypocrisy is clearly staggering. He is a total propagandist for the US war machine.  Although Sean Penn has supported Venezuela’s revolution and other causes such as the Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 where he founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization which operated a 55,000 person tent camp for victims of the earthquake, he is still a mouthpiece for the Democratic party and any regime change operation they deem necessary, so it is fair to say that both, Sean Penn and Ben Stiller are useful idiots.

Celebrities who Proudly Received their Covid-19 Vaccines

I am not going to get into the global lockdown and the dangers of the Covid-19 vaccine and the ridiculous enforcement of wearing facemasks or social distancing rules, so here are what several celebrities have posted on Instagram and twitter after they received their shots :

Lady Gaga:

“Double vaxed + boosted…don’t 4get to still wear a mask this sh*ts contagious ,

America Ferrara:

“Boosted for the holidays!  Thankful for the miracle of science and medicine allowing me to be with my loved ones safely this year 

Amber Heard:

 “Did someone say ‘vaccine queen’?! ” 

Sean Penn (No Surprise here!):

“I’m a lucky man. Lucky to work alongside the ⁦@LAFD & our great frontline @CoreResponse staff, our partners at Carbon Health, USC, & Curative Lab,” he tweeted. “We test & vaccinate thousands per day. We need your support to get more people lucky. Text CORE to 707070 to donate.”

*Note: Sean Penn was interviewed by Yahoo Entertainment and said that “My deep belief personally, is that these [vaccines are] no different than having everybody being able to drive 100 miles an hour in a car” he continued “This is one of those things that should be mandatory. That we all get with the exception — the very few exceptions — for those people who, for whatever medical condition, might offset it, but I do think that vaccines need to be mandatory, and I do think that business — all businesses, the movie business, all businesses — need to take the lead and to be not so timid in dealing with their collective bargaining agreement partners.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger:

 “All right, I just got my vaccine, and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone, come with me if you want to live.”

Despite all the evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines are dangerous and that wearing a facemask or social distancing does not work which brings me to the conclusion that these Hollywood celebrities are either brainwashed by the mainstream media, or they are just following the lies of Anthony Fauci who was elevated to celebrity status during the Covid-19 “pandemic”.  These people are not role models, they are just following what the medical establishment has prescribed to the public.  They are propagandizing the public to take Covid-19 killer shots which demonstrates that no one should listen to these people. Once you inject the MRNA technology into your body, its forever, its permanent and you cannot detox to get rid of it.  So in other words, don’t listen to these fools.

The Truth about Hollywood

There is no doubt that Hollywood has produced good films in the past but the Hollywood of today should focus on producing better movies and TV shows because most of their films are made only for propaganda purposes. In fact, many films today have no originality, better yet, there should be an alternative Hollywood that produces films without any form of propaganda that are worth watching. They can produce films that tells us real stories from around the world, like stories that come out of the Palestinian struggle or what is happening in certain parts of Africa as in the Hollywood movie ‘Blood Diamond’ with Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou that tells the story about the Diamond industry and its effects on the African people. Instead they produce propaganda films based on the US Military fighting for democracy or numerous films based on the Jewish Holocaust. When was the last time you saw a film based on the genocide of a Native American tribe on the North American continent?

However, Hollywood is pretty good at producing movies that offend different nationalities and cultures.  As we all know who really runs Hollywood, one documentary that shows some of the most offensive films based on the Muslim world is called ‘Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People’ by Dr. Jack Shaheen. 

Hollywood and their useful idiot celebrities are propagandists who support the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 vaccines and other globalist agendas including the concept of eating bugs as recommended by the World Economic Forum.  The bottom line is that Hollywood and their useful idiot celebrities are a bunch of clowns that should not be taken seriously, so why do people around the world idolize these people in the first place is beyond me.

Why the CIA Attempted a ‘Maidan Uprising’ in Brazil

Posted on by
Reply

By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

A former US intelligence official has confirmed that the shambolic Maidan remix staged in Brasilia on 8 January was a CIA operation, and linked it to the recent attempts at color revolution in Iran.

On Sunday, alleged supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, bypassing flimsy security barricades, climbing on roofs, smashing windows, destroying public property including precious paintings, while calling for a military coup as part of a regime change scheme targeting elected President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva.

According to the US source, the reason for staging the operation – which bears visible signs of hasty planning – now, is that Brazil is set to reassert itself in global geopolitics alongside fellow BRICS states Russia, India, and China.

That suggests CIA planners are avid readers of Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar, formerly of the New York Fed. In his ground-breaking 27 December report titled War and Commodity Encumbrance, Pozsar states that “the multipolar world order is being built not by G7 heads of state but by the ‘G7 of the East’ (the BRICS heads of state), which is a G5 really but because of ‘BRICSpansion’, I took the liberty to round up.”

He refers here to reports that Algeria, Argentina, Iran have already applied to join the BRICS – or rather its expanded version “BRICS+” – with further interest expressed by Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Indonesia.

The US source drew a parallel between the CIA’s Maidan in Brazil and a series of recent street demonstrations in Iran instrumentalized by the agency as part of a new color revolution drive: “These CIA operations in Brazil and Iran parallel the operation in Venezuela in 2002 that was highly successful at the start as rioters managed to seize Hugo Chavez.”

Enter the “G7 of the East”

Straussian neo-cons placed at the top of the CIA, irrespective of their political affiliation, are livid that the “G7 of the East” – as in the BRICS+ configuration of the near future – are fast moving out of the US dollar orbit.

Straussian John Bolton – who has just publicized his interest in running for the US presidency – is now demanding the ouster of Turkey from NATO as the Global South realigns rapidly within new multipolar institutions.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his new Chinese counterpart Qin Gang have just announced the merging of the China-driven Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Russia-driven Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). This means that the largest 21st century trade/connectivity/development project – the Chinese New Silk Roads – is now even more complex, and keeps expanding.

That sets the stage for the introduction, already being designed at various levels, of a new international trading currency aimed at supplanting then replacing the US dollar. Apart from an internal debate among the BRICS, one of the key vectors is the discussion team set up between the EAEU and China. When concluded, these deliberations will be presented to BRI-EAEU partner nations and of course the expanded BRICS+.

Lula at the helm in Brazil, in what is now his third non-successive presidential term, will offer a tremendous boost to BRICS+, In the 2000s, side by side with Russian President Putin and former Chinese President Hu Jintao, Lula was a key conceptualizer of a deeper role for BRICS, including trade in their own currencies.

BRICS as “the new G7 of the East,” as defined by Pozsar, is beyond anathema – as much for Straussian neo-cons as for neoliberal.

The US is being slowly but surely expelled from wider Eurasia by concerted actions of the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Ukraine is a black hole – where NATO faces a humiliation that will make Afghanistan look like Alice in Wonderland. A feeble EU being forced by Washington to de-industrialize and buy US Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) at absurdly high cost has no essential resources for the Empire to plunder.

Geoeconomically, that leaves the US-denominated “Western Hemisphere,” especially immense energy-rich Venezuela as the key target. And geopolitically, the key regional actor is Brazil.

The Straussian neo-con play is to pull all stops to prevent Chinese and Russian trade expansion and political influence in Latin America, which Washington – irrespective of international law and the concept of sovereignty, continues to call “our backyard.” In times where neoliberalism is so “inclusive” that Zionists wear swastikas, the Monroe Doctrine is back, on steroids.

All about the ‘strategy of tension’

Clues for Maidan in Brazil can be obtained, for instance, at the US Army Cyber Command at Fort Gordon, where it’s no secret the CIA deployed hundreds of assets across Brazil ahead of the recent presidential election – faithful to the “strategy of tension” playbook.

CIA chatter was intercepted at Fort Gordon since mid-2022. The main theme then was the imposition of the widespread narrative that ‘Lula could only win by cheating.’

A key target of the CIA operation was to discredit by all means the Brazilian electoral process, paving the way for a prepackaged narrative that is now unraveling: a defeated Bolsonaro fleeing Brazil and seeking refuge at former US president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion. Bolsonaro, advised by Steve Bannon, did flee Brazil, skipping Lula’s inauguration, but because he’s terrified he may be facing the slammer sooner rather than later. And by the way, he is in Orlando, not Mar-a-Lago.

The icing on the stale Maidan cake was what happened this past Sunday: fabricating a 8 January in Brasilia mirroring the events of 6 January, 2021 in Washington, and of course imprinting the Bolsonaro-Trump link on people’s minds.

The amateurish nature of 8 January in Brasilia suggests CIA planners got lost in their own plot. The whole farce had to be anticipated because of Pozsar’s report, which everyone-who-matters has read across the New York-Beltway axis.

What is clear, is that for some factions of the powerful US establishment, getting rid of Trump at all costs is even more crucial than crippling Brazil’s role in BRICS+.

When it comes to the internal factors of Maidan in Brazil, borrowing from novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, everything walks and talks like the Chronicle of a Coup Foretold. It is impossible that the security apparatus around Lula could not have foreseen these events, especially considering the tsunami of signs on social networks.

So there must have been a concerted effort to act softly – without any preventive big sticks – while just emitting the usual neoliberal babble.

After all, Lula’s cabinet is a mess, with ministers constantly clashing and some members supporting Bolsonaro even a few months ago. Lula calls it a “national unity government,” but it is more like a tawdry patchwork job.

Brazilian analyst Quantum Bird, a globally respected physics scholar who has returned home after a long stint in NATO lands, notes how there are “too many actors in play and too many antagonistic interests. Among Lula’s ministers, we find Bolsonarists, neoliberal-rentiers, climate interventionism converts, identity politics practitioners and a vast fauna of political neophytes and social climbers, all well aligned with Washington’s imperial interests.”

CIA-stoked ‘militants’ on the prowl

One plausible scenario is that powerful sectors of the Brazilian military – at the service of the usual Straussian neo-con think tanks, plus global finance capital – could not really pull off a real coup, considering massive popular rejection, and had to settle at best for a “soft” farce. That illustrates just how much this self-aggrandizing and highly corrupt military faction is isolated from Brazilian society.

What is deeply worrying, as Quantum Bird notes, is that the unanimity in condemning 8 January from all quarters, while no one took responsibility, “shows how Lula navigates virtually alone in a shallow sea infested by sharpened corals and hungry sharks.”

Lula’s position, he adds, “decreeing a federal intervention all by himself, without strong faces of his own government or relevant authorities, shows an improvised, disorganized and amateurish reaction.”

And all that, once again, after CIA-stoked “militants” had been organizing the “protests” openly on social media for days.

The same old CIA playbook though remains at work. It still boggles the mind how easy it is to subvert Brazil, one of the natural leaders of the Global South. Attempted old school coups cum regime change/color revolution scripts will keep being played – remember Kazakhstan in early 2021, and Iran only a few months ago.

As much as the self-aggrandizing faction of the Brazilian military may believe they control the nation, if Lula’s significant masses hit the streets in full force against the 8 January farce, the army’s impotence will be graphically imprinted. And since this is a CIA operation, the handlers will order their tropical military vassals to behave like ostriches.

The future, unfortunately, is ominous. The US establishment will not allow Brazil, the BRICS economy with the best potential after China, to be back in business with full force and in synch with the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Straussian neo-cons and neoliberals, certified geopolitical jackals and hyenas, will get even more ferocious as the “G7 of the East,” Brazil included, moves to end the suzerainty of the US dollar as imperial control of the world vanishes.

The Americans Started the US War with Russia

Posted on by
4

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

By Robert Urie

Source: CounterPunch

The ongoing US war against Russia has elevated American-allied Nazis to the international stage as ‘freedom fighters,’ resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, raised the risk of nuclear war, ended any effective international cooperation on environmental issues through rekindling energy geopolitics, assured Europe of one or more Great Depression type winters with limited heating fuel, and more probably than not will soon produce the total annihilation of Ukraine as a modern state by the Russians.

The ‘American view’ towards the war, informed domestically by an absence of the political violence that the US so regularly visits upon innocents around the globe, rank ideology, state propaganda, ignorance of world history, and the narrow economic interests of American oligarchs, imagines that it is fighting Frankenstein’s monster when it is that monster. What is the strategic interest of Ukraine to the US? More importantly, is it worth a potentially world-ending war?

In recent history, the US could have abided by the 1991 promise made by the George H.W. Bush administration to keep NATO away from Russia’s border. The US could have negotiated a security agreement with the Russians— as they have regularly requested over the last three decades. The US could have made Ukraine abide by the Minsk Accord(s) to which the Ukrainians and Russians had in principle agreed. There have been so many requests from the Russians to negotiate a lasting peace with the US that there is no convincing argument that the US didn’t want this war.

And yet the American anti-war left continues to insist, with decades of evidence to the contrary, that German and French guardians of the oligarchs (Scholz, Macron) would / could have overridden the (Joe) Biden administration’s drive to war when, as I predicted here in 2019, Biden was brought to power by the national security state to launch a war against Russia. Biden was up to his eyeballs in the US-led coup in Ukraine in 2014, was subsequently appointed to be the American prefect in Ukraine; and began preparing for war the day he entered office.

The reason why the US wants a war with Russia is first and foremost that the poor policy choices of the US political leadership over the last five decades ended American economic and political dominance somewhere around 2008. Starting in the 1970s, market fundamentalist ideology became the American tool of choice for extracting wealth from poor and working people and nations around the globe. The political class, acting at the behest of industrialists and Wall Street, believed its own fantasy that ‘nature,’ and not imperialist looting, had made rich Americans rich.

The result since the 1970s has been a shift from political leaders governing to the ideological use of government to serve business interests. The logic is that business makes ‘us’ rich, despite the fact that most of ‘us’ aren’t rich. The insight that emerged from the Great Depression— that unhindered capitalism was both unstable and destabilizing, was flipped to the disproven logic that it is government that destabilizes capitalism. In economic terms, this shift placed American liberals well to the political right of the historical American political right.

The response from power was to redefine left and right in terms that flattered power. Capitalism could be made ‘just’ by making it fairer, went the new political project of the liberal – left. This, despite half-a-millennium of capitalism causing the very illiberalism that it is now expected to ameliorate. This imagined flat society, where one ‘equal’ earns a few billion dollars a year scamming widows and orphans while another ‘equal’ begs for money on a highway off-ramp, defines the political project of this new left.

To the social democracy that young liberals eternally call for, the US had that in the 1970s, just before it was abandoned by liberals. The (Ronald) Reaganite effort to shift resources, and with it, power, from the public sphere to the private was matched by liberals using an ideological market fundamentalism to accomplish similarly motivated outcomes from a better-hidden position. Wall Street and the largely privatized US military were re-elevated to be the economic bludgeon / capital allocation device of militarized capitalist-imperialism.

More to the point, social-democratic governments have been the vanguard of neoliberalism since the 1970s. Recall, the Biden administration was going to broaden economic distribution through raising the minimum wage, govern on the side of labor, enact environmental programs that might actually stabilize, or even reverse, environmental decline, and it was going to keep the US out of forever wars. While Democrats may need another twenty or thirty years to acquaint themselves with their actual policies, the other 80% of the country has already come to different conclusions.

In the meantime, the US has two political parties to represent the interests of capital and the radical right, but none to support the interests of ‘the people’ more broadly considered. Quickly, what are the metrics by which quasi-privatized public schools (Charter Schools) are measured? Well, most have been exempted from having to demonstrate that they are successfully educating students for a decade or more. How about healthcare? Since the ACA was implemented in 2015, 3 – 5 million Americans have died who wouldn’t have if the US had a functioning healthcare system.

The point is that, as these metrics suggest, raising profits for ‘American’ corporations has been the singular goal of social-democratic policies in the US, and similarly in Europe. The easiest way to sell ruling class interests as those of ‘the people’ is to claim that they are for the people— while setting them up to benefit only executives and oligarchs. Question: if Americans understood that the American war against Ukraine was provoked by the Americans, would they still support it? If so, why are the Biden administration and the state-affiliated press (NYT, WP) continuing to lie about the causes of the war?

With Ukraine being supplied with weapons by the US; being central to American oil geopolitics in Europe; and key to the neo-colonial wealth extraction from Ukraine that the US imagines it will exert after the conflict ends, US arms and materiel makers started shopping for larger houses the day that Joe Biden was elected president. But again, the cost is being paid by others. Russians and Ukrainians (and Poles, etc.) are dying to raise profits for ‘American’ corporations. And the Ukrainians that manage to survive the war will rue the day that they handed control of Ukraine to the Americans.

An historical analogy: during WWII the OUN-B (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists- Bandera) had Ukrainian nationalists join with the German Nazis to commit racist / antisemitic atrocities across Eastern Europe and ultimately, to attack the Soviets. These Banderites—followers of Ukrainian nationalist and enthusiastic Nazi Stepan Bandera, imagined that Adolf Hitler would want like-minded Nazis to rule Ukraine as a racialized Nazi state. Surprise: Hitler was using the Banderites to further the Nazi goal of defeating the Soviets. The German Nazis reportedly shot OUN-B leaders when they dared to suggest that they be allowed to rule Ukraine.

This brings us to the current geopolitical predicament. The American war against Russia comes as the US political leadership tries to recover a functioning economy using the same logic and institutions that produced the dysfunction in the first place. Deindustrialization? Check. Financialization? Check. Militarization? Check. The American economic and political leadership spent five decades ending what it was that America ‘does’ without any apparent plan to address the (predictable) consequences that are now upon us.

The American war against Russia has been framed by the Americans in terms of oil geopolitics and humanitarian intervention. A seven-year-old with a map of the world could see easily enough that geography favors the Russians in terms of both prosecuting a major war in Europe and providing oil and gas to Europeans and to European industry. The effort by the American political and military leadership to cleave Europe from Russia faces this insurmountable problem of geography. Add 4,000 miles of supply lines, the distance from the US to Germany, to the Nazi Siege of Leningrad for insight into the nature of the problem.

Moreover, the American plan reeks of desperation. The explanation given by the Biden administration, by CIA linked commercial news outlets like the New York Times, and by what is claimed to be a dissident left in the US, depends on a stopping point in history that few outside of the US find plausible. The Russians were rebuffed by the Americans for three decades as they tried to negotiate security guarantees, including immediately prior to the launch of Russia’s SMO (Special Military Operation) and again in April 2022, when UK PM Boris Johnson told the Ukrainian political leadership that the Americans had refused any negotiations.

(Here is a background history of the US – Russia conflict that I wrote a couple of weeks after the conflict started. Here is where I correctly predicted in 2019 that Joe Biden would be brought to power by the national security state to launch a war against Russia. And here is a history of the American alliance with German and Ukrainian Nazis for purposes of enticing them to commit terrorist attacks against the Soviets, now the Russians, since the mid-1940s).

(Here is American historian and Cold Warrior George Kennan explaining US President Woodrow Wilson’s use of the American Expeditionary Force in 1919 to launch a stealth American war against the Bolsheviks with the goal of reversing the October Revolution. As ideologically and constitutionally inconvenient as this might be for American liberals and ‘the left,’ there is history to the US – Russia relationship that preceded the launch of Russia’s SMO (Special Military Operation) in 2022.

Likewise, American claims of Ukrainian sovereignty are almost too stupid to countenance. Starting in 2013, the US State Department, likely with direct or indirect assistance from the CIA and its stealth cut-outs like NED (National Endowment for Democracy), stoked a burgeoning uprising by the Ukrainian people to turn it into an American regime change operation. Around this same time Ukrainian Nazis from Right Sector and Svoboda committed suspiciously well-timed atrocities against Ukrainian citizens that de-legitimated the democratically elected president of Ukraine to install a government chosen by the American State Department.

The ‘American view’ has it that the Ukrainian people ousted the Ukrainian President, after which Ukraine returned to being the liberal democracy that it never was. In fact, an early act by the US was to retain predatory and potentially extractive loans from the IMF for Ukraine that the Ukrainian people are on the hook to repay. From 2014 forward the US was arming, supplying, and training Ukrainian militias, including significant contingents of self-described Nazis, to fight in the civil war that the US instigated.

At the time of the launch of Russia’s SMO, US-armed Nazis had surrounded Russian ethnic enclaves in Eastern Ukraine and were preparing to ethnically-cleanse Russian-speaking Ukrainians from Eastern Ukraine. This followed eight-years of civil war where the Americans supplied, armed, and trained Ukrainian Nazis to do exactly that. Why Russia’s SMO doesn’t qualify as ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the American view, while far more destructive American interventions in Syria, Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. do, would be a puzzle if it were a puzzle.

For those who missed it, here is the infamous ‘fuck the EU’ call from 2014 where former US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, lays out US plans to install a US-allied puppet government to run Ukraine following the US-led coup there. To my knowledge, this (link above) is the only clip that includes mention of Joe Biden’s future role as the American prefect in Ukraine. Recall: the first Trump impeachment was over Trump halting weapons shipments that the US was sending to Ukraine to commit terrorist attacks against Russia with.

While Joe Biden appears to have played largely a figure-head role in the coup and subsequent CIA / Nazi civil war against Russian-speaking Ukrainians, what he represents to not-Americans is the persistence of an adversarial foreign policy towards Russia that re-emerged when US President Bill Clinton reneged on the George H.W. Bush administration’s promise to keep NATO away from Russia’s border. Biden’s response has been to censor press accounts that contradict the official storyline while using state propaganda to convince gullible liberals that Nazis doing the bidding of American capital are ‘freedom fighters.’

The question for most of us is: why? What possible interest does American capital have in destroying Ukraine? Well, there is the means— weapons and materiel ‘lent’ to the Ukrainian-Nazi leadership by the Americans that they (the Ukrainians) will spend the next several decades paying for. There is the replacement of Russian oil and gas with more expensive and environmentally-destructive-to-transport ‘American’ oil and gas. There is the rebuilding of Ukraine by American corporations at Ukrainian expense after it has been destroyed. And there is the regional control over Europe currently imagined to accrue to the Americans from the war.

But how realistic is this? If the Americans can blow up the Nord Stream pipeline supplying Russian LNG to Europe, why can’t the Russians blow up LNG transport ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean to deliver ‘American’ oil and gas to Europe? More to the point, how will European industry be affected by rising energy prices that disproportionately affect it? Reminder: Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the pit of the Great Depression. Is another Great Depression in Europe really what the Americans want?

The Wall Street meltdown of 2008 raised very basic questions regarding the future role of the US in the world. The child-like / aggressively implausible stage of neoliberal capitalism (1980s – today), where the US abandoned its industrial policy while deindustrializing the nation in order to foster money-manager capitalism where bankers allocate capital— mostly to themselves, raises the question of what it is that Americans ‘do?’ In history, the trajectory ran from manufacturing to service jobs to gig jobs.

Joe Biden has been a part of every bad policy decision that the American political leadership has made from the 1970s to today. The neoliberal turn? Check. Resources wars for ‘American’ business interests? Check. Repressive social policies to create the largest carceral population in world history? Check. Promoting George W. Bush’s lie that Iraq possessed WMDs? Check. Privatizing and cutting Social Security? Check. Funding executive bonus pools under the guise of solving environmental problems? Check.

Biden was elected to start a war with Russia. If you follow the history, he has been in place at critical junctures to do just that. That he was a right-wing, neoliberal, war hawk for forty-eight of his fifty years of public self-service— until he ran for president in 2020, should have been a clue that he was the wrong politician for this time. And while the warm embrace of American liberals with self-described Nazis is no surprise here, the broader political context suggests that those interested in political solutions should stop calling each other names and end the war.

This written, the US is in a bad way. And it will remain so no matter who is president. These problems will be intractable until the existing distribution of wealth and power has been reconsidered (redistributed). As long as Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, and Amazon rule the nation, ‘public’ policies will be for their benefit, not ours. Younger readers don’t have twenty or thirty years to figure this out. The problem with low and mid-level conflicts that persist is that they can escalate in the blink of an eye. This war has to be ended quickly. The Americans need to end the bullshit and negotiate a peace.