Tag Archives: Donald Trump

American Requiem

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However inequitable its bias, capitalist democracy at least offered the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform. Now it is a corpse.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost.com

Well, it’s over. Not the election. The capitalist democracy. However biased it was towards the interests of the rich and however hostile it was to the poor and minorities, the capitalist democracy at least offered the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform. Now it is a corpse. The iconography and rhetoric remain the same. But it is an elaborate and empty reality show funded by the ruling oligarchs — $1.51 billion for the Biden campaign and $1.57 billion for the Trump campaign — to make us think there are choices. There are not. The empty jousting between a bloviating Trump and a verbally impaired Joe Biden is designed to mask the truth. The oligarchs always win. The people always lose. It does not matter who sits in the White House. America is a failed state.

“The American Dream has run out of gas,” wrote the novelist J.G. Ballard. “The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.”

There were many actors that killed America’s open society. The corporate oligarchs who bought the electoral process, the courts and the media, and whose lobbyists write the legislation to impoverish us and allow them to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth and unchecked power. The militarists and war industry that drained the national treasury to mount futile and endless wars that have squandered some $7 trillion and turned us into an international pariah. The CEOs, raking in bonuses and compensation packages in the tens of millions of dollars, that shipped jobs overseas and left our cities in ruins and our workers in misery and despair without a sustainable income or hope for the future. The fossil fuel industry that made war on science and chose profits over the looming extinction of the human species. The press that turned news into mindless entertainment and partisan cheerleading. The intellectuals who retreated into the universities to preach the moral absolutism of identity politics and multiculturalism while turning their backs on the economic warfare being waged on the working class and the unrelenting assault on civil liberties. And, of course, the feckless and hypocritical liberal class that does nothing but talk, talk, talk.

If there is one group that deserves our deepest contempt it is the liberal elites, those who posture as the moral arbiters of society while abandoning every value they purportedly hold the moment they become inconvenient. The liberal class, once again, served as pathetic cheerleaders and censors for a candidate and a political party that in Europe would be considered on the far-right. Even while liberals were being ridiculed and dismissed by Biden and by the Democratic Party hierarchy, which bizarrely invested its political energy in appealing to Republican neocons, liberals were busy marginalizing journalists, including Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who called out Biden and the Democrats. The liberals, whether at The Intercept or The New York Times, ignored or discredited information that could hurt the Democratic Party, including the revelations on Hunter Biden’s laptop. It was a stunning display of craven careerism and self-loathing.

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are, the election has illustrated, oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. Restoring the rule of law, universal health care, banning fracking, a Green New Deal, the protection of civil liberties, the building of unions, the preservation and expansion of social welfare programs, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, the forgiveness of student debt, stiff environmental controls, a government jobs program and guaranteed income, financial regulation, opposition to endless war and military adventurism were once again forgotten. Championing these issues would have resulted in a Democratic Party landslide. But since the Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate donors, promoting any policy that might foster the common good, diminish corporate profits and restore democracy, including imposing campaign finance laws, was impossible. Biden’s campaign was utterly bereft of ideas and policy issues, as if he and the Democrats could sweep the elections by promising to save the soul of America. At least the neofascists have the courage of their demented convictions.

The liberal class functions in a traditional democracy as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It ameliorates the worst excesses of capitalism. It proposes gradual steps towards greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with supposed virtues. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements. The liberal class is a vital component within the power elite. In short, it offers hope and the possibility, or at least the illusion, of change.

The surrender of the liberal elite to despotism creates a power vacuum that speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, often led by charismatic demagogues, fill. It opens the door to fascist movements that rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the absurdities of the liberal class and the values they purport to defend. The promises of the fascists are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth. Once the liberal class ceases to function, it opens a Pandora’s box of evils that are impossible to contain.

The disease of Trumpism, with or without Trump, is, as the election illustrated, deeply embedded in the body politic. It is an expression among huge segments of the population, taunted by liberal elites as “deplorables,” of a legitimate alienation and rage that the Republicans and the Democrats orchestrated and now refuse to address. This Trumpism is also, as the election showed, not limited to white men, whose support for Trump actually declined.

Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the behavior of Russia’s useless liberal class, which he satirized and excoriated at the end of the 19th century, as presaging a period of blood and terror. The failure of liberals to defend the ideals they espoused inevitably led, he wrote, to an age of moral nihilism. In Notes From Underground, he portrayed the sterile, defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who hold up high ideals but do nothing to defend them. The main character in Notes From Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He accommodates a corrupt and dying power structure in the name of liberal ideals. The hypocrisy of the Underground Man dooms Russia as it now dooms the United States. It is the fatal disconnect between belief and action.

“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being.”

The refusal of the liberal class to acknowledge that power has been wrested from the hands of citizens by corporations, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have been revoked by judicial fiat, that elections are nothing more than empty spectacles staged by the ruling elites, that we are on the losing end of the class war, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality.

The “idea of the intellectual vocation,” as Irving Howe pointed out in his 1954 essay This Age of Conformity, “the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization — has gradually lost its allure. And, it is this, rather than the abandonment of a particular program, which constitutes our rout.” The belief that capitalism is the unassailable engine of human progress, Howe wrote, “is trumpeted through every medium of communication: official propaganda, institutional advertising and scholarly writings of people who, until a few years ago, were its major opponents.”

“The truly powerless people are those intellectuals — the new realists — who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political figures,” Howe wrote. “For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades — as well as to the relationship between ‘wealth’ and ‘intellect’ — that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.” 

Populations can endure the repression of tyrants, as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia, a conflict I covered for The New York Times. 

The historian Fritz Stern in The Politics of Cultural Despair, his book on the rise of fascism in Germany, wrote of the consequences of the collapse of liberalism. Stern argued that the spiritually and politically alienated, those cast aside by the society, are prime recruits for a politics centered around violence, cultural hatreds and personal resentments. Much of this rage, justifiably, is directed at a liberal elite that, while speaking the “I-feel-your-pain” language of traditional liberalism, sells us out.

“They attacked liberalism,” Stern writes of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany, “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

We are in for it. The for-profit health care system, designed to make money — not take care of the sick — is unequipped to handle a national health crisis. The health care corporations have spent the last few decades merging and closing hospitals, and cutting access to health care in communities across the nation to increase revenue — this, as nearly half of all front-line workers remain ineligible for sick pay and some 43 million Americans have lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. The pandemic, without universal health care, which Biden and the Democrats have no intention of establishing, will continue to rage out of control. Three hundred thousand Americans dead by December. Four hundred thousand by January. And by the time the pandemic burns out or a vaccine becomes safely available, hundreds of thousands, maybe a few million, will have died.

The economic fallout from the pandemic, the chronic underemployment and unemployment — close to 20 percent when those who have stopped looking for work, those furloughed with no prospect of being rehired and those who work part-time but are still below the poverty line are included in the official statistics — will mean a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. Hunger in US households has already tripled since last year. The proportion of US children who are not getting enough to eat is 14 times higher than last year. Food banks are overrun. The moratorium on foreclosures and evictions has been lifted while over 30 million destitute Americans face the prospect of being thrown into the street.

There is no check left on corporate power. The inevitable social unrest will see the state, no matter who is in the White House, use its three principle instruments of social control — wholesale surveillance, the prisons and militarized police — buttressed by a legal system that routinely revokes habeas corpus and due process, to ruthlessly crush dissent. People of color, immigrants and Muslims will be blamed and targeted by our native fascists for the nation’s decline. The few who continue in defiance of the Democratic Party to call out the crimes of the corporate state and the empire will be silenced. The sterility of the liberal class, serving the interests of a Democratic Party that disdains and ignores them, fuels the widespread feelings of betrayal that saw nearly half the voters support one of the most vulgar, racist, inept and corrupt presidents in American history. An American tyranny, dressed up with the ideological veneer of a Christianized fascism, will, it appears, define the empire’s epochal descent into irrelevance.

Imperial Overstretch Arrives: Americans Do Not Need the American Empire

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By Philip Giraldi

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

This piece is being written as voters are going to the polls on election day in the United States. While it has been useful to consider how things might change, possibly for the worse, one must also recognize that much of what happens in the U.S. and in its far-flung empire operates by virtue of its own internal dynamics and rules, something that is often referred to as the “Deep State” or perhaps more accurately as the Establishment.

Witness for example the occasional possibly sincere but unsuccessful White House attempts over the past four years to withdraw or reduce the numbers of U.S. troops embroiled in various armed conflicts worldwide. All of those initiatives have been frustrated or redirected in one way or another and it is not simply a question of bungling by a politically insensitive Donald Trump versus the result that might have been obtained by a more experienced and responsible Democrat. What drives the empire’s engine is essentially bipartisan, even in its own way, apolitical, existing as it does as a form of leaderless shadow government that functions as a community-of-interest rather than a bureaucracy. It is inclusive and reflective of the real centers of power in the country, namely the national security state and Wall Street.

In a recent article Pepe Escobar dispels any expectation that a kinder, gentler foreign policy might emerge from the election. He describes with some alarm how victory by Biden will mean that the national security “Blob” team that wrecked Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and Libya while also assassinating Americans overseas under President Barack Obama will be back. He cites former CIA presidential briefer Ray McGovern who persuasively describes the “Blob” as the MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex). One might well add the Federal Reserve Bank to that list.

So, the engine keeps chugging on, driven my its own self-interests and completely oblivious to what is going on around it. The irony is that the crisis in confidence that simultaneously is besetting the United States in part reflects a very real, largely self-inflicted decline in America’s place in the world due to insistence that it maintain global hegemony. It comes at a time when the empire is entering into a phase of increasing irrelevancy which many of the key players involved are either unable or unwilling to recognize, no matter what their political affiliation might be. That means that the United States is locked into a pattern of behavior that it is incapable of changing. It is a nation that has become addicted to war for no good reason, and that addiction has brought neither security nor prosperity.

The signs are everywhere. The costs of empire continue to rise while real benefits to be derived from it are elusive. The United States government spends far more on a bloated defense budget than it can afford, adding to an unsustainable national debt that currently exceeds $27 trillion, which is 128% of the country’s entire gross domestic product. The debt will likely increase dramatically if there are any more coronavirus stimulus packages. The nation is becoming hollowed out as a result.

America’s “allies” have inevitably rightly become increasingly disengaged from Washington, reluctant to comply with Washington’s directions and demands, while the developing transition from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is proceeding and will have catastrophic consequences. When the U.S. Treasury stops being able to print money at will, there will be national insolvency.

In terms of the United States’ interaction with the world, a country that not so long ago was widely respected is now regarded as the principal source of international instability, disliked everywhere but Israel, another rogue nation. And the internal damage inside the U.S. to core values and expectations is also evident, to include increasingly dysfunctional schools that focus on political correctness rather than education, crumbling infrastructure, a broken health care system, and a dying industrial and manufacturing base. Unique among all developed countries, life expectancy among working class Americans is declining.

At the root of it all is what Yale professor Paul Kennedy once described as “imperial overstretch,” which means projection of power in support of global commitments that are not essential to national well-being and bankrupting oneself in the process. The reality is that unless an “imperial” acquisition is done purely for exploitative reasons, as Belgium did in the Congo, having an empire operates at a considerable loss. Napoleon “overstretched” when he invaded Russia and both Russia and Austria-Hungary collapsed as a result of the First World War because the stress of external conflict made their obligations far exceed their resources. Great Britain’s Empire likewise became expendable after World War Two when the costs of maintaining outposts “east of Suez” became much larger than the benefits.

So, there are many good reasons for the United States to retrench and again become a “normal” nation, if that is at all possible, but the fact that no candidate but Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders even suggested that America’s global interventionism might be reconsidered or even reversed is telling. Both were eliminated by the Democratic party establishment. In the case of Gabbard, the executioner was no less than Hillary Clinton. Whoever is the new president, he will inherit the awful conceit that he is the “leader of the free world.” It is past time for a serious discussion of America’s proper place in the world, but that will require completely overturning the country’s Establishment and challenging the “exceptionalism” view that the U.S. must dominate as a “force for good.” Unfortunately, there is no politician anywhere on the horizon who is able and willing to take the lead on such an endeavor.

Win-Win vs Lose-Lose: The Time Has Come for the World to Choose

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By Matthew Ehret

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

It is a tragedy of our age that society has been locked in a zero-sum operating system for so long that many people living in the west cannot even imagine a world order designed in any other way… even if that zero sum system can ultimately do nothing but kill everyone holding onto it.

Is this statement too cynical?

It is a provable fact that if one chooses to organize their society around the concept that all players of a “great game” must exist in a finite world of tension as all zero-sum systems presume, then we find ourselves in a relatively deterministic trajectory to hell.

You see, this world of tension which game masters require in today’s world are generated by increasing rates of scarcity (food, fuel, resources, space, etc). As this scarcity increases due to population increases tied to heavy doses of arson, it naturally follows that war, famine, and other conflict will rise across all categories of divisions (ethnic, religious, linguistic, gender, racial etc). Showcasing this ugly misanthropic philosophy during a December 21, 1981 People Magazine Interview, Prince Philip described the necessity of reducing the world population stating:

“We’re in for a major disaster if it isn’t curbed-not just for the natural world, but for the human world. The more people there are, the more resources they’ll consume, the more pollution they’ll create, the more fighting they will do. We have no option. If it isn’t controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily by an increase in disease, starvation, and war.”

When such a system is imposed upon a world possessing atomic weapons, as occurred in the wake of FDR’s death and the sabotage of the great president’s anti-colonial vision, the predictably increased rates of conflict, starvation and ignorance can only spill over into a global war if nuclear superpowers chose to disobey the limits and “norms” of this game at any time.

Perhaps some utopian theoreticians sitting in their ivory towers at Oxford, Cambridge or the many Randian think tanks peppering foreign policy landscape believed that this game could be won if only all nation states relinquished their sovereignty to a global government… but that hasn’t really happened, has it?

Instead of the relinquishing of sovereignty, the past decade has seen a vast rise of nationalism across all corners of the earth which have been given new life by the rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and broader multipolar alliance. While these impulses have taken on many shapes and forms, they are united in the common belief that nation states must not become a thing of the past but rather must become determining forces of the world’s economic and political destinies.

The Case of the Bi-Polar USA

Unfortunately, within the USA itself where nationalism has seen an explosive rise in popularity under President Trump, the old uni-polar geopolitical paradigm has continued to hold tight under such neocon carryovers as Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Esper, CIA director Gina Haspel and the large caste of Deep State characters still operating among the highest positions of influence on both sides of the aisle.

While I genuinely believe that Trump would much rather work with both Russia, China and other nations of the multipolar alliance in lieu of blowing up the world, these aforementioned neocons think otherwise evidenced by Pompeo’s October 6 speech in Japan. In this speech, Pompeo attempted to rally other Pacific nations to an anti-Chinese security complex known as the Quad (USA, Australia, Japan and India). With his typically self-righteous tone, Pompeo stated that “this is not a rivalry between the United States and China. This is for the soul of the world”. Earlier Pompeo stated “If the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us.”

Pompeo’s efforts to break China’s neighbours away from the Belt and Road Initiative have accelerated relentlessly in recent months, with territorial tensions between China and Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei being used by the USA to enflame conflict whenever possible. It is no secret that the USA has many financial and military tentacles stretching deep into all of those Pacific nations listed.

Where resistance to this anti-China tension is found, CIA-funded “democracy movements” have been used as in the current case of Thailand, or outright threats and sanctions as in the case of Cambodia where over 24 Chinese companies have been sanctioned for the crime of building infrastructure in a nation which the USA wishes to control.

Pompeo’s delusional efforts to consolidate a Pacific Military bloc among the QUAD states floundered fairly quickly as no joint military agreement was generated creating no foundation upon which a larger alliance could be built.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi accurately called out this regressive agenda on October 13 saying:

“In essence [the Indo-Pacific Strategy] aims to build a so-called Indo-Pacific NATO underpinned by the quadrilateral mechanism involving the United States, Japan, India and Australia. What it pursues is to trumpet the Cold War mentality and to stir up confrontation among different groups and blocs and to stoke geopolitical competition. What it maintains is the dominance and hegemonic system of the United States. In this sense, this strategy is itself an underlying security risk. If it is forced forward it will wind back the clock of history.”

China Responds with Class

China’s response to this pompous threat to peace was classy to say the least with Wang Yi teaming up with Yang Jiechi (Director of China’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission) who jointly embarked on simultaneous foreign tours that demonstrated the superior world view of “right-makes-might” diplomacy. Where Wang Yi focused his efforts on Southeast Asia with visits to the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Laos, Thailand and Singapore, Yang Jiechi embarked on a four-legged tour of Sri Lanka, the UAE, Algeria and Serbia.

While COVID assistance was a unifying theme throughout all meetings, concrete economic development driven by the Belt and Road Initiative was relentlessly advanced by both diplomats. In all bilateral agreements reached over this past week, opportunities for cooperation and development were created with a focus on diminishing the points of tension which geopolticians require in order for their perverse “game” to function.

In Malaysia, the $10 billion, 640 Km East Coast Rail link was advanced that will be completed with China’s financial and technical help by 2026 providing a key gateway in the BRI, as well as two major industrial parks that will service high tech products to China and beyond over the coming decades.

After meeting with Wang Yi on October 9, Indonesia’s Special Presidential Envoy announced that “Indonesia is willing to sign cooperation documents on the Belt and Road Initiative and Global Maritime Fulcrum at an early date, enlarge its cooperation with China on trade and investment, actively put in place currency swap arrangements and settlements in local currency, step up the joint efforts in human resources and disaster mitigation, and learn from China’s fight against poverty.”

In Cambodia, a major Free Trade Agreement was begun which will end tariffs on hundreds of products and create new markets for both nations. On the BRI, the New International Land-Sea Trade corridor and Lancang-Mekong Cooperation plans were advanced.

In the Philippines, Wang Yi and Foreign Minister Locsin discussed Duterte’s synergistic Build Build Build program which reflects the sort of long term infrastructure orientation characteristic of the BRI which are both complete breaks with the decades-long practices of usurious IMF loans which have created development bottlenecks across the entire developing sector.

In Thailand Wang Yi met with the Thai Prime Minister where the two accelerated the building of the 252 km Bangkok-Korat high speed rail line which will then connect to Laos and thence to China’s Kunmin Province providing a vital artery for the New Silk Road.

In the past few years, the USA has been able to do little to counter China’s lucrative offers while at best offering cash under the rubric of the Lower Mekong Initiative established under the Hillary-Obama administration in preparation for the Asia Pivot encirclement of China that was unleashed in 2012. This was done as part of a desperate effort to keep China’s neighbors loyal to the USA and was meant to re-enforce Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership which Trump thankfully destroyed during his first minutes in office.

Yang Jiechi’s Four-Legged Tour

In Sri Lanka, a $90 million grant was offered by China which will be devoted to medical resources, water supplies and education and which the Chinese embassy website stated “will contribute to the well being of Sri Lankans in a post-COVID era”. Another $989 million loan was delivered for the completion of a massive expressway stretching from Central Sri Lanka’s tea growing district to the Port of Hambanota. While this port is repeatedly used by detractors of the BRI like Pompeo as proof of the “Chinese debt trap”, recent studies have proven otherwise.

In the UAE, the Chinese delegation released a press release after meeting with Prince Zayed al-Nahyan stating: “Under the strategic guidance of President Xi and the Abu Dhabi crown prince, China will enrich the connotation of its comprehensive strategic partnership with UAE, cement the political trust and support, promote alignment of development strategies, and advance high-quality joint construction of the Belt and Road.”

In Algeria, Yang offered China’s full support for the New Economic Revival Plan which parallels the Philippines’ Build Build Build strategy by focusing on long term industrial growth rather than IMF-demands for privatization and austerity that have kept North Africa and other nations backward for years.

Finally in Serbia which is a vital component of the BRI, the Chinese delegation gave its full support to the Belgrade-Budapest railway, and other long term investments centered on transport, energy and soft infrastructure, including the expansion of the Chinese-owned Smederevo Steel Plant which employs over 12 000 Serbians and which was saved from bankruptcy by China in 2016. By the end of the trip, Prime Minister Brnabic announced: “Serbia strongly supports China both bilaterally and multilaterally, including President Xi Jinping’s Access and Roads Initiative and the 17+1 Cooperation Mechanism, in the context of which most of Serbia’s infrastructure and strategy projects will be realized”

The Spirit of Win-Win Must Not Be Sabotaged

Overall, the spirit of the growing New Silk Road is fast moving from a simple east-south trade route towards a global program stretching across all of Africa, to the Middle East, to the High Arctic and Latin America. While this program is driven by a longer view of the past and future than most westerners realize, it is quickly becoming evident that it is the only game in town with a future worth living in.

While China has committed to the enlightened idea that human society is more than a “sum of parts”, the Cold Warriors of the west have chosen to hold onto obsolete notions of human nature that suppose we live in a world of “each vs. all”. These obsolete notions are premised on the bestial idea that our species is destined to do little more than fight for diminishing returns of scraps in a closed -system struggle for survival where only a small technocratic elite of game masters calling themselves “alphas” control the levers of production and consumption from above.

Thus far, President Trump has distinguished himself from other dark age war hawks in his administration by promoting a foreign policy outlook centered on economic development. This has been seen in his recent victories in achieving economic normalization between Serbia and Kosovo, and endorsing the Alaska-Canada railway last month. With the elections just around the corner and the war hawks flying in full force, it is clear that these piecemeal projects, though sane and welcomed are still not nearly enough to break the USA away from its course of war with China and towards a new age of win-win cooperation required for the ultimate survival of our species.

The Election Has Already Been Hijacked and the Winner Decided: ‘We the People’ Lose

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” ― Herbert Marcuse

Republicans and Democrats alike fear that the other party will attempt to hijack this election.

President Trump is convinced that mail-in ballots are a scam except in Florida, where it’s safe to vote by mail because of its “great Republican governor.”

The FBI is worried about foreign hackers continuing to target and exploit vulnerabilities in the nation’s electoral system, sowing distrust about the parties, the process and the outcome.

I, on the other hand, am not overly worried: after all, the voting booths have already been hijacked by a political elite comprised of Republicans and Democrats who are determined to retain power at all costs.

The outcome is a foregone conclusion: the Deep State will win and “we the people” will lose.

The damage has already been done.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has been tasked with helping to “secure” the elections and protect the nation against cyberattacks, is not exactly an agency known for its adherence to freedom principles.

After all, this is the agency largely responsible for turning the American republic into a police state. Since its creation, the DHS has ushered in the domestic use of surveillance drones, expanded the reach of fusion centers, stockpiled an alarming amount of ammunition (including hollow point bullets), urged Americans to become snitches through a “see something, say something” campaign, overseen the fumbling antics of TSA agents everywhere, militarized the nation’s police, spied on activists and veterans, distributed license plate readers and cell phone trackers to law enforcement agencies, contracted to build detention camps, carried out military drills and lockdowns in American cities, conducted virtual strip searches of airline passengers, established Constitution-free border zones, funded city-wide surveillance cameras, and undermined the Fourth Amendment at every turn.

So, no, I’m not losing a night’s sleep over the thought that this election might by any more rigged than it already is.

And I’m not holding my breath in the hopes that the winner of this year’s popularity contest will save us from government surveillance, weaponized drones, militarized police, endless wars, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture schemes, overcriminalization, profit-driven private prisons, graft and corruption, or any of the other evils that masquerade as official government business these days.

You see, after years of trying to wake Americans up to the reality that there is no political savior who will save us from the police state, I’ve come to realize that Americans want to engage in the reassurance ritual of voting.

They want to believe the fantasy that politics matter.

They want to be persuaded that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats (there’s not).

Some will swear that Donald Trump has been an improvement on Barack Obama (he is not).

Others are convinced that Joe Biden’s values are different from Donald Trump’s (with both of them, money talks).

Most of all, voters want to buy into the fantasy that when they elect a president, they’re getting someone who truly represents the citizenry rather than the Deep State (in fact, in the oligarchy that is the American police state, an elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots in cooperation with a political elite).

The sad truth is that it doesn’t matter who wins the White House, because they all work for the same boss: Corporate America. Understanding this, many corporations hedge their bets on who will win the White House by splitting their donations between Democratic and Republican candidates.

Politics is a game, a joke, a hustle, a con, a distraction, a spectacle, a sport, and for many devout Americans, a religion. It is a political illusion aimed at persuading the citizenry that we are free, that our vote counts, and that we actually have some control over the government when in fact, we are prisoners of a Corporate Elite.

In other words, it’s a sophisticated ruse aimed at keeping us divided and fighting over two parties whose priorities, more often than not, are exactly the same so that we don’t join forces and do what the Declaration of Independence suggests, which is to throw the whole lot out and start over.

It’s no secret that both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty. Most of all, both parties enjoy an intimate, incestuous history with each other and with the moneyed elite that rule this country.

Despite the jabs the candidates volley at each other for the benefit of the cameras, they’re a relatively chummy bunch away from the spotlight. Moreover, despite Congress’ so-called political gridlock, our elected officials seem to have no trouble finding common ground when it’s time to collectively kowtow to the megacorporations, lobbyists, defense contractors and other special interest groups to whom they have pledged their true allegiance.

So don’t be fooled by the smear campaigns and name-calling or drawn into their divide-and-conquer politics of hate. They’re just useful tactics that have been proven to engage voters and increase voter turnout while keeping the citizenry at each other’s throats.

It’s all a grand illusion.

It used to be that the cogs, wheels and gear shifts in the government machinery worked to keep the republic running smoothly. However, without our fully realizing it, the mechanism has changed. Its purpose is no longer to keep our republic running smoothly. To the contrary, this particular contraption’s purpose is to keep the Deep State in power. Its various parts are already a corrupt part of the whole.

Just consider how insidious, incestuous and beholden to the corporate elite the various “parts” of the mechanism have become.

Congress. Perhaps the most notorious offenders and most obvious culprits in the creation of the corporate-state, Congress has proven itself to be both inept and avaricious, oblivious champions of an authoritarian system that is systematically dismantling their constituents’ fundamental rights. Long before they’re elected, Congressmen are trained to dance to the tune of their wealthy benefactors, so much so that they spend two-thirds of their time in office raising money. As Reuters reports, “For many lawmakers, the daily routine in Washington involves fundraising as much as legislating. The culture of nonstop political campaigning shapes the rhythms of daily life in Congress, as well as the landscape around the Capitol. It also means that lawmakers often spend more time listening to the concerns of the wealthy than anyone else.”

The President. What Americans want in a president and what they need are two very different things. The making of a popular president is an exercise in branding, marketing and creating alternate realities for the consumer—a.k.a., the citizenry—that allows them to buy into a fantasy about life in America that is utterly divorced from our increasingly grim reality. Take President Trump, for instance, who got elected by promising to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump has paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the rest of the Deep State (also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group”) to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic. The lesson: to be a successful president, it doesn’t matter whether you keep your campaign promises, sell the American people to the highest bidder, or march in lockstep with the Corporate State as long as you keep telling people what they most want to hear.

The Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court—once the last refuge of justice, the one governmental body really capable of rolling back the slowly emerging tyranny enveloping America—has instead become the champion of the American police state, absolving government and corporate officials of their crimes while relentlessly punishing the average American for exercising his or her rights. Like the rest of the government, the Court has routinely prioritized profit, security, and convenience over the basic rights of the citizenry. Indeed, law professor Erwin Chemerinsky makes a compelling case that the Supreme Court, whose “justices have overwhelmingly come from positions of privilege,” almost unerringly throughout its history sides with the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful.

The Media. Of course, this triumvirate of total control would be completely ineffective without a propaganda machine provided by the world’s largest corporations. Besides shoveling drivel down our throats at every possible moment, the so-called news agencies which are supposed to act as bulwarks against government propaganda have instead become the mouthpieces of the state. The pundits which pollute our airwaves are at best court jesters and at worst propagandists for the false reality created by the American government. When you have internet and media giants such as Google, NBC Universal, News Corporation, Turner Broadcasting, Thomson Reuters, Comcast, Time Warner, Viacom, Public Radio International and The Washington Post Company donating to political candidates, you no longer have an independent media—what we used to refer to as the “fourth estate”—that can be trusted to hold the government accountable.

The American People. “We the people” now belong to a permanent underclass in America. It doesn’t matter what you call us—chattel, slaves, worker bees, it’s all the same—what matters is that we are expected to march in lockstep with and submit to the will of the state in all matters, public and private. Unfortunately, through our complicity in matters large and small, we have allowed an out-of-control corporate-state apparatus to take over every element of American society.

We’re playing against a stacked deck.

The game is rigged, and “we the people” keep getting dealt the same losing hand. The people dealing the cards—the politicians, the corporations, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, the bureaucrats, the military, the media, etc.—have only one prevailing concern, and that is to maintain their power and control over the citizenry, while milking us of our money and possessions.

It really doesn’t matter what you call them—Republicans, Democrats, the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that while they are dealing the cards, the deck will always be stacked in their favor.

As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, our failure to remain informed about what is taking place in our government, to know and exercise our rights, to vocally protest, to demand accountability on the part of our government representatives, and at a minimum to care about the plight of our fellow Americans has been our downfall.

Now we find ourselves once again caught up in the spectacle of another presidential election, and once again the majority of Americans are acting as if this election will make a difference and bring about change. As if the new boss will be different from the old boss.

When in doubt, just remember what the astute commentator George Carlin had to say about the matter:

The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork…. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. …The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice…. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on…. It’s called the American Dream, ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.

The USA on the brink of civil war

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In this article, the author seeks to draw our attention to a fact that is difficult for Westerners to conceive of: the American people are experiencing a crisis of civilization. They are so deeply divided that the presidential election is not just about electing a leader, but about determining what the country (empire or nation?) should be. Neither side is capable of accepting to lose, so much so that each could resort to violence to impose its point of view.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, the country is divided into two camps that suspect each other of preparing a coup d’état. On one side are the Democrats and the non-party Republicans, and on the other are the Jacksonians, who have become the majority in the Republican Party without sharing its ideology.

Remember, already in November 2016, a media manipulation company headed by the master of Agit-Prop, David Brock, raised more than 100 million dollars to destroy the image of the President-elect before he was elected [1]. Since then, before he could do anything about it, the international press has portrayed the U.S. president as incapable and an enemy of the people. Some newspapers have even called for his assassination. For almost four years, his own administration has constantly denounced him as a traitor paid by Russia and the international press has violently criticized him.

Currently, another group, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), is planning scenarios to overthrow him in the 2020 election, whether he loses it or wins it. The case has become national in scope since TIP founder Professor Rosa Brooks leaked a lengthy article in the Washington Post to which she is a regular contributor [2].

The TIP organized four role-playing games last June. It simulated various results to anticipate the reactions of the two candidates. All the participants were Democrats and Republicans (ideologically speaking, not “Republicans” in the sense of party membership), none of them Jacksonian. Unsurprisingly, all of these personalities believe that “the Trump administration has consistently undermined basic standards of democracy and the rule of law. It has adopted many corrupt and authoritarian practices. They therefore concluded that President Trump would attempt a coup d’état and imagined that it was their duty to pre-emptively devise a “democratic” coup d’état [3].

It is a characteristic of contemporary political thought to stand up for democracy, but to reject decisions that run counter to the interests of the ruling class. Indeed, TIP members readily admit that the US electoral system they defend is profoundly “anti-democratic”. The constitution does not attribute the presidential election to citizens, but to an electoral college of 538 people appointed by the governors. The participation of citizens, which was not foreseen at independence, has gradually become the norm in practice, but only as a guide for governors. Thus, in 2000, when George W. Bush was elected, the Florida Supreme Court recalled that it did not have to know the wishes of the citizens of Florida, but only those of the 27 voters appointed by their Florida governor.

Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Constitution does not recognize popular sovereignty, but only the sovereignty of governors. Moreover, the Electoral College designed by Thomas Jefferson has not functioned properly since 1992: the elected candidate no longer has the majority of the wishes of the citizens in the states that tilt the election [4].

The TIP has highlighted just about everything that could happen in the three months between the election and the nomination. It acknowledges that it will be very difficult to determine the results given the use of absentee voting in times of epidemic. The TIP deliberately did not explore the possibility that the Democratic Party would announce Joe Biden’s election despite an undercount and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would swear him in before Donald Trump could be declared the loser. In such a case, there would be two rival presidents, which would mark the beginning of a Second Civil War.

This eventuality encourages some to consider seceding, to unilaterally proclaim the independence of their state. This is particularly true on the West Coast. To prevent this process of disintegration, some advocate dividing California in order to give more members of the Electoral College to its population. However, this solution is already a stance in the national conflict because it favours popular representation at the expense of the power of the governors.

In addition, last March I mentioned the temptation of a putschist coup by some military personnel, [5] to which several high-ranking officers later referred [6].

These different points of view attest to the deep crisis that the United States is going through. The “American empire” should have disintegrated after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This did not happen. It should have reinvented itself with financial globalization. It did not. Each time, a conflict (the ethnic division of Yugoslavia, the attacks of September 11) came to rekindle the dying. It will no longer be possible to postpone the deadlines for much longer [7].

 

Translation
Roger Lagassé

 

[1] “The Clinton system to discredit Donald Trump”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Zero Hedge (USA) , Voltaire Network, 28 February 2017.

[2] “What’s the worst that could happen? The election will likely spark violence — and a constitutional crisis”, The Washington Post, September 3, 2020.

[3] Preventing a disrupted presidential election and transition, Transition Integrity Project, August 3, 2020.

[4] Presidential elections and majority rule, Edward B. Foley, Oxford University Press, 2020.

[5] “Putchists in the Shadow of the Coronavirus”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 31 March 2020.

[6] “The Pentagon against President Trump”, Voltaire Network, 12 June 2020. Do we risk a miltary coup?, by Colonel Richard H. Black, August 24, 2020.

[7] “United States – reformation or fracture?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 26 October 2016.

Trump’s Murder of Qassem Soleimani: Why We Must Stand Up to the Christianity of Brutality.

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ISTANBUL, TURKEY – JANUARY 05: People hold posters showing the portrait of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Major General Qassem Soleimani and chant slogans during a protest outside the U.S. Consulate on January 05, 2020 in Istanbul, Turkey. Major General Qassem Soleimani, was killed by a U.S. drone strike outside the Baghdad Airport on January 3. Since the incident, tensions have risen across the Middle East. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

By Sander Hicks

Source: New York Megaphone

This is the investigation that prompted our publication to establish an online conference on Nonviolence, and the Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, Oct. 2, 2020. It’s essential we understand how Pompeo and the GOP justify their violence in the name of Christianity. The future of nonviolence must stand apart from the “Christianity of Brutality.” That’s what Jesus would do.

Earlier this year, President Trump shocked the world by murdering a high-ranking Iranian government official. Pressured by Secretary Pompeo, Trump ordered the assassination of an Iranian general who enjoyed movie-star celebrity status in his home country, General Qassem Soleimani. The killing brought the world to the brink of a major new war. Among the many laws this act broke, it violated Iraqi sovereignty, as it took place in Iraq. It happened in the middle of the night on January 3rd, 2020, using an American MQ-6 Reaper drone.

Dexter Filkins, in the New Yorker, called the hit on Soleimani, “the most consequential act taken against the regime in Tehran in thirty years.” And that’s saying a lot, because the US has inflicted much suffering on Iran over time, from CIA coups, to pushing Iraq to kill a million Iranians in the “Iran-Iraq War,” to today’s harsh economic sanctions. Yet Iran has grown into an influential regional superpower able to stand toe-to-toe with US proxies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, to see through the hypocrisy and the posturing of the War on Terror.

Trump, earlier, wanted to re-open negotiations towards a new Nuclear Agreement with Iran. He was in contact with President Rhouhani. But killing the charismatic Soleimani shut down any chance of a new nuclear deal. Now the Iranians are free to develop their nuclear power capabilities, unhindered.

Trump was left to explain himself. How could the US President justify this attack?

Remember that one year ago, things were boiling over in Iraq/Iran. Various Iran-backed militias rioted in Baghdad and broke the windows at US consulates. An American contractor was killed and US officials feared another Benghazi, or a new Tehran-style Embassy hostage crisis like in 1979. The US Military and Trump responded by killing 25 Shi’a militia members. Pentagon top brass then offered killing Soleimani as an additional option but assumed Trump wouldn’t be so brash. That was like giving a pyromaniac teenager a set of matches and five gallons of gasoline.

Killing a foreign government official is illegal, according to US policy and international law. Trump, at first, asserted Soleimani had plans to target four U.S. embassies, a claim that his own Defense Secretary Esper was not able to substantiate.  It “seems to be totally made up,” said Congressman Justin Amash from Michigan.

On Twitter, Trump tried to give the last word by claiming that the US acted in self-defense because Soleimani posed an “imminent threat.” But Trump seemed unconvinced himself, as he tweeted that it “doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past.”

Ah, but it does matter.

Killing people is a crime, you see, and a lot of people think so. The US has written laws that restrain this kind of thing from coming out of the White House, as it does so much damage to the U.S.’s moral standing in the world. (If capitalism and imperialism haven’t mangled that reputation forever.)

Former DA Vincent Bugliosi, in his book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, showed that presidents could well go to prison for the extrajudicial killings and illegal wars they engage in. The Hague Convention of 1907 and the UN ban the killing of a foreign government official, outside of wartime. Even Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, denounced “assassination, poison, perjury” as brutal statecraft, “held in just horror.”

In the wake of the killings of JFK and MLK and the targeted domestic killings of COINTEL-PRO, the US Congress convened the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the mid and late ’70s. President Gerald Ford responded by issuing an executive order that has since become standard US policy. No US government employee “shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”

President Reagan affirmed and expanded this policy against assassination. But back at the Trump White House, the pressure to kill Soleimani came from evangelical Christian Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. CNN reported that White House insiders said Pompeo “was the one who made the case to take out Soleimani, it was him absolutely.” Pompeo also made a claim that Soleimani posed an “imminent threat,” but later backed off that claim, and instead explained that Soleimani had the “blood of American [soldiers]” on his hands from working with the Iraqi resistance.

At a loss for legal justification, Vice President Mike Pence stepped up with a “Hail Mary” kind of throw. He asserted that there may be a connection between Soleimani and “the 12 9/11 attackers.” (But Mike, there were 19 hijackers on 9/11.) Students of history will note that the NeoCon Right still invokes 9/11 when it’s desperate to justify a crime. 9/11 still has that power 20 years later. It’s like a myth that is eternal. If we allow it.

 

Who Was Qassem Soleimani

Millions of Iranians poured out into the streets for a three-day funeral in all top Iranian cities and towns. Hamed Ghashgavi in Tehran, told me, “General Soleimani, we know he was popular but none of us thought millions will mourn his death!”

Qassem Soleimani “had a command presence,” CIA Veteran John Maguire said. “He walked into the room and you could feel him.” Maguire had negotiated with Soleimani in Baghdad in 2004.

A native of the more tribal Southern Iranian province of Kerman, Soleimani was born in 1957. He fought at the front lines of the Iran/Iraq war, that nine-year slog fought with chemical weapon assaults, compliments of Iraq. The grinding agony, often in trenches, was compared to World War I. Inside Iran, the conflict is known as the “War of Holy Defense.” But the Reagan White House viewed the Iran/Iraq War as a chance to get aggressive and retaliate for the late 70’s hostage crisis. The US supported Iran‘s biggest rival, Saddam Hussein, as he invaded Iran. The USA gave Hussein several billions in economic aid and military training to help attack the nascent Islamic Republic.

The experience of Iraq invading Iran was deeply formative on young Soleimani, who lost many friends in the war. But Soleimani there became a legend known as “The Goat Burglar” for his talents at slipping behind enemy lines and coming back with live goats to feed his platoon. He regularly volunteered to fight at the front lines. He had a deep camaraderie with his fellows. Before battle, he would kiss each of them on the forehead and pray with them to be martyred.

From the end of the War, to 1997, Soleimani laid low, he didn’t get on well with President Rafsanjanhi. But sooner after that period, he rose to lead the elite “Quds” aka “Jerusalem” Force division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. His power grew, as did his closeness with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Gen. Petreaus once recalled that Soleimani told him, “You should know that I, Qassem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan.”

Soleimani as US Ally Against Terrorism

In the corporate US media, Soleimani’s death was brushed off. He was expendable. A “terrorist.”

But a deeper look past the demonization shows an interesting pattern. Soleimani had a history of working with the Americans. Every time he worked with the USA, it went well for the Americans. In the end, the USA just stabbed him in the back.

When 9/11 happened, the Bush/Cheney regime decided to target Afghanistan and its Taliban regime. Qassem Soleimani saw an opportunity to reduce terrorism in the land immediately to the east of Iran. Soleimani worked with the US attacking forces. He and Iranian diplomats shared intelligence with the US on Taliban positions. The Americans informed the Iranians about an al-Qa`ida agent hiding out in Mashhad in eastern Iran.  Soleimani was, “pleased with [the] cooperation,” and spoke at this time that “maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans.”

It was not to be.

Bush and Cheney bowed to pressure from their Zionist wing and slapped the Iranians in the face with the “Axis of Evil” speech. It has been a long-standing policy of Israel to block any rapprochement between the US and Iran. Bush named Iran as a leading proponent of terrorism, despite its recent work against terrorism, with the Americans in Afghanistan. Soleimani felt betrayed.

Cut to 2014, and the US is back asking for Iran’s help, when US coalition forces are losing in Iraq. The jihadists were on the offensive, taking territory in Iraq, including the major city of Mosul. Iraq’s leading Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani, issued a call-to-arms to fight the Sunni extremists. Young Shia men volunteered by the thousands. Soleimani and his elite Quds Force helped organize them.

For the next three years, until 2017, Iran helped turn the tide there against ISIS and Al Nusra. On a number of occasions, Americans were hitting Islamic State targets from the air while General Soleimani directed ground forces against the militants.

At the same time, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel were working against Soleimani and Iran in Syria. The US had decided to work against the Ba’ath Arab Socialist, Bashar Assad, who sometimes enjoyed the support of Russia and Iran.

When Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) flew to Syria in 2017, it was to better understand the Syrian civil war. She met Assad and top Syrian officials. In the street, Syrian citizens begged her to stop the US funding of ISIS. She returned to Congress and proposed HR 608, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act. Because at this point, the US was fighting ISIS in Iraq, but working with ISIS in Syria. On the ground in Tehran, in 2017 at the New Horizon conference, when I asked Saudis, Arabs, and other locals from the region, who is funding ISIS? People uniformly named either Saudi Arabia or the USA.

Pop Quiz. Name the only country that has consistently opposed the Islamic State and al-Qaeda?

The Answer? No, it’s not the USA. It’s Iran.

The History of the US/Iran Relationship: 

A Crash Course from 1953 to the Present

Iran is a regional superpower in a kind of local “cold war” against Saudi Arabia and Israel. There are a set of facts that no one should do without when trying to figure out the real history of the Iran/US relationship.  A deeper understanding of this history could begin to lay the groundwork to re-establish diplomatic ties, which have been suspended since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

In 2000, even Madeline Albright recognized that the CIA’s brutal 1953 coup overthrew the democratically-elected progressive Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and replaced him with the fickle Iranian king, Reza Shah. With their SAVAK secret police, the Shahs repressed dissidents and communists, and so Islam became the legal method of resistance. When President Jimmy Carter allowed the ailing Shah to travel to the USA to receive healthcare, Ayatollah Khomeini called for a general strike in Iran and flew back to Iran from his exile in France. 98% of the population voted to replace the monarchy with the Islamic Republic, in a referendum vote.

Because of the US’s support of the Shah, the Islamic Revolution resulted in an unplanned take-over of the US embassy. 53 US hostages were kept for 444 days until they were released on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

During the Iran/Iraq War, it’s worth noting that young Qassem Soleimani met the young Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when both were fighting the Iraqi invasion. They would have a long, complicated relationship, as Adhmadinejad would go on to become elected President of Iran, from 2005 to 2013. His politics were “hardliner” compared to his successor, the more moderate Rouhani. Ahmadinejad may be most famous for his 2010 speech in front of the United Nations, in which he questioned the official story about 9/11.

Regarding 9/11/01, Iran was not involved, but US Allies were. The USA’s CIA Counterintelligence Database reports that two Mossad agents were among five Israelis arrested by NJ Police, on 9/11/01, for celebrating the attacks publicly, as they watched the World Trade Center burn. Held in custody for two months by FBI, Bush officials intervened and all five were released to go back to Israel. On Israeli television, they were celebrated as heroes.

15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, including two with ties to Saudi intelligence (Al Mihdhar and Al Hamzi). When Congress’s suppressed “28 Pages” of its own 9/11 Report were released in 2016, they documented Saudi funding of the 19 hijackers, from none other than US Ambassador from Saudi Arabia,  Prince Bandar bin Sultan (aka “Bandar Bush”). But even Bandar’s many appearances in the suppressed “28 Pages” have yet to prompt a grand jury investigation in US courts.

Later that month, in September 2001, General Wesley Clark, reported that a senior general inside the Pentagon told him, “Here’s the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We’re going to take out seven countries in five years.’ And he named them…ending with Iran.”

The Iraq War officially started in 2003 and phase one didn’t end until 2011. Similar to the 9/11 official story, the premise for the Iraq War was a loose set of assumptions and insinuations, not hard facts or evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Hussein’s overthrow and execution was another targeted killing on a grander scale, similar to that of Soleimani. The Bush/Cheney “War on Terror” was a colossal waste of money, even by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute. “A recent study…puts the cost of the War on Terror at roughly $5 trillion — a truly astonishing number. Even if one believes American efforts have made the nation marginally safer, the United States could have achieved far greater improvements in safety and security at far less cost through other means.”

In 2007, German news magazine Die Spiegel leaked that Vice President Dick Cheney had a secret plan to invade Iran next.

Barack Obama was elected as a symbol of hope and change, but his pick of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was tragic for Iran. Hillary Clinton removed the Iranian terrorist group MEK from the State Department’s “Terrorism Watch List” in 2012. The media crowed that the lobbyists had done it again, as MEK represents big money ex-patriate Iranians who would like to see violent regime change in Iran. MEK was once a bizarre culty Islamic splinter group, banished to Albania, and hated in Iran for backing Iraq in the Iran/Iraq War. But money changes everything, and now with lavish funding, these days the MEK throws huge gala events in DC and NYC and pays Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton to come speak.

After President Barack Obama jettisoned Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, he did some ground-breaking work by working with moderate President Rouhani and signing the “Iran Nuclear Deal,” the JCPOA in 2015.

In 2017, with Trump in Office, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and others routinely ignored the Trump White House’s multiple calls to pressure Iran militarily. Their belief was that Syria’s Assad had effectively won the Syrian civil war, thanks to Iran and Russia, and now the war on ISIS took priority. Mattis quit at the end of 2018 when Trump demanded US withdrawal from Syria.

In 2018, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson quit as Secretary of State, and Mike Pompeo succeeded him. Pompeo lost no time in focussing a target on his longtime nemesis, Qassem Soleimani. It started in April of 2019, with the shocking designation of Iran’s entire Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) as a “terrorist organization.” According to The Iran Agenda book by Reuters reporter Reese Erlich, the IRGC is a huge economic entity in Iran, and it controls about 10% of the entire Iranian economy. So declaring IRGC a terrorist organization would be like declaring Amazon a terrorist organization in the US.

But there were more than words in the declaration. The knives were coming out. “Bolton and Pompeo knew that that designation opened up the targeting aperture,” one former senior Trump administration official said.

 

War Powers

In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. It requires the President to report to Congress whenever armed forces are introduced “into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated,” and to terminate any hostilities after 60 days unless authorized by Congress.

But since 1973, Congress has done little to reclaim its constitutional responsibility to control the war machine. Professor Jack Goldsmith points out, “Our country has, quite self-consciously, given one person, the President, an enormous sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war.”

If there’s any one issue that may someday inspire a US Constitutional Convention, it may be the long history the USA has had with a “unitary executive” who abuses their powers to wage undeclared wars on smaller, weaker nations. Our system is running contrary to the spirit and the letter of the US Constitution. What happened in the Soleimani case is more than just the murder of one man. It shows that our current class of leadership, from Clinton to Trump, is so in love with violence, it crosses a line into contempt for the Constitution. The love of war is all.

What could possess their souls?

 

The Christianity of Brutality

The flaws of the American brand of evangelical Christianity led directly to Soleimani’s fiery death with nine others. The dominant religion in America birthed a bloody global trauma that caused the whole planet to smell the stench of World War III. However, any student of the New Testament will notice that Jesus actually stood against the nationalism and the exclusionary practices of the Jewish leadership. He called the Pharisees and Scribes, “vipers” and even worse, “lawyers.”

Jesus’s pivotal lesson about the Good Samaritan exposes the hypocrisy of the “purity” of the High Priests. They were so obsessed with purity, they wouldn’t help a man beaten up in the street. Their religion blinded them to the basic humanity in all of us. At a time of crisis, when we need something to unite us, religion could reveal an inner light within us all. The Good Samaritan story holds up the forgotten and hated people of our day.  The one who is hated most by society turns out to have the most heart. The outsider, the Samaritan ignores all the codes of the day and stops to care for the crushed and bloodied man. That’s the path. Actions of compassion and healing are the true way, not a religion of showiness, prestige, and power.

Mike Pompeo and the neoConservative Christians are super Pro-Israel, because their Christianity is based in the Old Testament, where God is oftentimes a violent, nationalistic force who favors his “Chosen People” in their many wars.  Pompeo has compared Trump to King Cyrus, and likes to dwell on the Book of Esther, in which the Jewish people commit genocide on the Iranians/Persians, killing over 5,000 in one fell swoop. (An event celebrated every year with the Jewish feast of Purim.)

The Old Testament also has eternal wisdom, great laws, and lessons in it, like “Thou Shalt Not Kill” from the Ten Commandments. The Wisdom literature, such as Psalms and Proverbs, show the universal conception of God, evolving into a more compassionate, loving vision over time. But to rely on the Old Testament as a true book of history is shaky ground. To base US Foreign Policy on it is ahistorical. Most of the Old Testament is war stories, in which genocide and exclusion are held up as ideals. A little-known fact is that some early Christians didn’t at first want to include the Old Testament in their Bible. They felt that the teachings of Christ were complete: be humble, be of service, make your life about truth, integrity, and nonviolence. These were so much more substantial than the old books, which had led directly to the superficial posturing of the Pharisees, and the “Simple Way” resistance of Jesus of Nazareth.

It seems that with the killing of Soleimani, something has hijacked the spirituality of a man like Mike Pompeo. He became a “born-again Christian” inside the super-powered pressure-cooker of West Point US Military Academy. It’s like someone only gave him half the story. The American right-wing wants the righteousness of religion without doing the real work of Jesus’s core command, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”

The story of the New Testament is really this: a young, passionate, former carpenter from the sticks, Jesus of Nazareth, picks up the oral traditions of  a “street rabbi.” Able to quote the prophets, see people’s problems, and inspire people to change, he becomes a traveling street preacher, able to talk about the love of God in a radical new way. He challenges the aristocracy of the high priests and denounces their rigidity and formalism. He gathers a wide range of people “from below.” He teaches and heals among the peasant and working classes (without excluding Roman soldiers). Drawing on the Wisdom literature, he expands and radicalizes his message, in a time in which occupied Palestine was seeking ways to resist the violence of the Roman Empire.  Influenced by the Zealots, and tempted by the lure of political power, Jesus ultimately rejected that path. He did consider it but rejected driving Rome out of Palestine with a sword. He even welcomed Pharisees at his gatherings and teaching sessions. His challenge to “love our enemies” was really a challenge to see that there is a light within all of us, including Americans, Israelis, and Iranians, and that it’s a common love of the truth. The historical Jesus never endorses killing people. He says we should “turn the other cheek” rather than retaliate with violence.

Essentially we have here an avatar, one of history’s most dynamic and radical figures, revered today in both Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, because he opened up a new space of what is possible for humanity: living in a place of dialogue, a love for the Word, sharing, truth, eating together, healing each other, reveling in our common humanity, and working out problems without violence. That is the space of God.

The violent Christianity of Mike Pompeo feels about as authentic as his boss, Donald Trump, wielding a Bible like a weapon, as a vague warning to protestors and radicals fed up with racism and police brutality.

They need to look deeper, because 2000 years ago, Jesus would have been among those protestors. According to the book Rabbi Jesus by Bruce Chilton, when Jesus cleared the Temple in Jerusalem, he went in with an affinity group of 50-100 followers. It was an “Occupy the Temple” action, in which Jesus stood up to capitalism: the money-changers, animal-sellers, and merchants who had turned religion into a business. Jesus and crew literally pushed over the tables and set the doves free. It clarified Jesus’s work and became one of his last public acts of direct action.

In their zeal to make Christianity about violence and Old Testament rivalries against Iran, Pompeo and Trump totally miss the revolutionary spirituality of compassion for all beings and the essentially anti-capitalist message of Jesus. I am reminded of the young, rich kid who comes up to Jesus in the New Testament and says, “Hey, I have followed all the rules, but nothing is working for me!” So Jesus says, You must give up all your wealth, your power, your status, all you cling to, and get on the road with us, follow this path, be inside our movement, follow me. But the kid couldn’t do it because he was too attached: to luxury, to his self-concept, to his fragile and tender illusions, to a status quo of empire, class, and power.

It’s like that kid today is Mike Pompeo, and all the American Christians who do what he does. They want to follow Jesus, but can’t escape their formalism, their illusions, they can’t give up the habits of easy nationalism, their remote-control high tech violence, their sloganeering and stereotyping. Jesus says something truly radical – it’s not too late to turn around – give up all you have and follow me.

Instead the modern day Pharisees have been sending the FBI out to harass American activists.

 

Summer of 2019: FBI at My Front Door

I have been researching this article for six weeks, but I began to write the first draft on August 6, 2020. That date is actually the one year anniversary of the FBI visiting my home to stifle my international travel plans to advocate for peace with Iran. It seems that calling for peace has become something of a crime, in the time of Trump and Pompeo.

The FBI also visited such US dissidents as former Pentagon official Michael Malouf, and former US-Saudi diplomatic attaché Michael Springmann, and about fifteen others. What we all had in common was that we had previously attended the Iranian’s New Horizon conference, where dissidents from the USA and other countries were able to gather, share views, network, and brainstorm solutions to the problems of aggression, imperialism, and world peace.

When the FBI was at my house, they handed over a copy of a recent indictment of an American who had defected to Iran. But this situation had nothing to do with the New Horizon conference. The US Treasury, however, had sent the FBI to enforce their recent harsh economic sanctions against New Horizon. Four Iranians from New Horizon were sanctioned for hosting this  international think tank, a kind of “Davos of the Global South.”

The FBI home visit was a gross violation of my core rights to free speech, religion, and the right to peaceably assemble and tackle grievances. The Bill of Rights took a backseat to an obsession with killing. We had been planning to attend the next New Horizon in Beirut that Fall.

This was certainly a nadir for US activists, but shortly thereafter, there was a bit of a thaw, when in September 2019, President Trump fired his White House war-monger, John Bolton.  And then, the next month after that, the “mastermind” of the Trump White Houses’s sanctions on Iran, Sigal Pearl-Mandelker, resigned after being harassed by peace activists at a public event.

 

Against the Balance of Power, Towards the Balance of Peace

President Woodrow Wilson, once said, “Peace cannot…rest upon an armed balance of power.” Lasting peace, he maintained, required “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.”

So instead of old religions, old rivalries, and old prejudices being given all of the power, what if the world could coalesce around a new vision, in which political assassination was banned, and just not required, because the balance of power was no longer based on violence.

The next step would be to map out a path to a place where we as one people on Earth can declare that war itself is simply out of date. How can we get to a place where we have outgrown it? The answer is to grow. We are close to being capable of global nonviolence. Gandhi said that the roots of nonviolence were already in the heart of all the world’s great religions.

The words of President Wilson ring true, “There is only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind, and that is…the power of the united moral forces of the world.”

“The power of the united moral forces of the world” is a power that peoples of all religions, and no religions, could get behind, support, and live.

Practical Proposals for Global Social Change

It’s time for a Truth and Reconciliation Conference around the murder of Qassem Soleimani. It will be a way to start to talk about the truth behind the “balance of power” and begin the healing among the peoples of the world.

So that’s why, this article is not just some investigative journalism about a criminal act, I have created a way for you to get involved, in an international dialogue, with Iranian and American activists, on Zoon, this Friday, on October 2, the International Day of NonViolence. From 4 PM to 9 PM, we will have political and spiritual speakers from Iran, and the USA, and other countries.

We will hold a global Truth and Reconciliation Conference, to talk about a global cultural shift, to change the entire system. We have a great bunch of speakers: everyone from Lt. Col. (Ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson, to radical priest Fr. John Dear, to Iranian film-maker Nader Talebzedeh.

Qassem Soleimani did not die in vain. He wanted to be a martyr. Now, let us work to have his death help to transform the world.

 

Come Celebrate Peace and Nonviolence, Celebrate Gandhi’s Birthday.

4PM – 9 PM Oct. 2 on Zoom. More Info:

https://www.newyorkmegaphone.com/oct-2-gandhi-nonviolence-day

The author of the article above wishes to acknowledge Porsché Mysticque Steele for her editorial work, and thanks also to C. Maupin for advice.

‘Confirmed’ Has Become A Meaningless Word In Mainstream News Reporting

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Last week Politico published a major exclusive report that the “Iranian government is weighing an assassination attempt against the American ambassador to South Africa” in retaliation for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani earlier this year, citing (you guessed it) anonymous government officials.

The claim was nonsensical on its face; the idea that Iran would see the assassination of some random ambassador to an irrelevant country as a proportionate response to the killing of its wildly beloved top military commander would only make sense to someone with a very US-centric worldview who knows nothing about Iran. On top of that, the South African government published a statement that “the information provided is not sufficient to sustain the allegation that there is a credible threat against the United States Ambassador to South Africa”.

The flimsy nature of this allegation was of course not enough to prevent bombastic Twitter threats from America’s manchild-in-chief that this nonexistent assassination plot “will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!” if carried out.

It also wasn’t enough to prevent the Politico article’s co-author, Natasha Bertrand, from falsely claiming that The New York Times had “confirmed” her reporting.

“The NYT has confirmed Nahal Toosi and my reporting about Iran,” Bertrand tweeted today with a link to a new Times article, quoting the excerpt “Lana Marks, the American ambassador to South Africa and a political supporter of Trump, was a potential target of an Iranian attack…Politico earlier reported that Ms. Marks was a target.”

The New York Times has in fact not confirmed Bertrand and Toosi’s reporting, and Bertrand omits a very significant portion of text from her excerpt. Here is the quote in full, bold mine:

Lana Marks, the American ambassador to South Africa and a political supporter of Mr. Trump, was a potential target of an Iranian attack, according to national security officials. But some briefed on the intelligence said Iran has not decided to directly target any American official, and other current and former officials accused the Trump administration of overstating the threat. Politico earlier reported that Ms. Marks was a target.

Awful lot of important information hiding in that ellipsis of yours, Ms Bertrand.

So NYT had in fact merely spoken to unnamed officials (probably some of the same ones) and found there to be misgivings about the claim Bertrand had promoted, and then Bertrand deceptively omitted text which contradicted the claim she was making that her report had been “confirmed”.

It should surprise no one that Bertrand would abuse the trust of her followers in such a phenomenally sleazy way. As Antiwar‘s Dave DeCamp explained after the Politico report was discredited by the South African government, Bertrand “built her career on hyping the Steele Dossier, a now-discredited document that made unverified claims about the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016.”

But Bertrand’s slimy manipulation is also to be expected because she knows she can get away with it. The word “confirmed” has been misused and abused to such a spectacular extent in mainstream news reporting of late that it doesn’t actually mean anything anymore when they say it.

When a news reporter announces that they have independently confirmed another outlet’s reporting, the reader imagines that they have done actual investigative journalism, traveled to the places about which the claims are being made, done deep digging and looked at the evidence with their own two eyes and found that the claim is true. In practice, all it often means is that they spoke to the same sources the other reporter spoke to and are in fact just confirming that the source did indeed make a given assertion. The reader assumes they’re confirming the source’s claim is true, but all they’re actually confirming is that the first reporter didn’t just make up the claim they’re uncritically parroting.

Take when the anonymously sourced story about Russia paying bounties to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for killing occupying coalition forces was first reported by The New York Times. We now know this story was completely baseless, but when it first broke there were a bunch of mass media reporters buzzing around claiming to have “confirmed” one another’s stories on the matter.

“The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have confirmed our reporting,” the NYT story’s co-author Charlie Savage tweeted after the story broke.

“We have confirmed the New York Times’ scoop: A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan,” tweeted The Washington Post‘s John Hudson.

“We matched The New York Times’ great reporting on how US intel has assessed that Russians paid Taliban to target US, coalition forces in Afg which is a pretty stunning development,” tweeted Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold.

All three of these men were lying.

John Hudson’s claim that the Washington Post article he co-authored “confirmed the New York Times’ scoop” twice used the words “if confirmed” with regard to his central claim, saying “Russian involvement in operations targeting Americans, if confirmed,” and “The attempt to stoke violence against Americans, if confirmed“. This is of course an acknowledgement that these things had not, in fact, been confirmed.

The Wall Street Journal article co-authored by Gordon Lubold cited only anonymous “people”, who we have no reason to believe are different people than NYT’s sources, repeating the same unsubstantiated assertions about an intelligence report. The article cited no evidence that Lubold’s “stunning development” actually occurred beyond “people familiar with the report said” and “a person familiar with it said“.

The fact that both Hudson and Lubold were lying about having confirmed the New York Times‘ reporting means that Savage was also lying when he said they did. When they said the report has been “confirmed”, what they really meant was that it had been agreed upon. All the three of them actually did was use their profoundly influential outlets to uncritically parrot something nameless spooks wanted the public to believe, which is the same as just publishing a CIA press release free of charge. It is unprincipled stenography for opaque and unaccountable intelligence agencies, and it is odious.

Earlier this month The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald published an article titled “Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using ‘Confirmed’ to Mean Its Opposite“, about an anonymously sourced claim by The Atlantic that Trump had said disparaging things about US troops. An excerpt:

Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”

Greenwald also documents how in 2017 CNN falsely reported that Donald Trump Jr had received an encryption key to WikiLeaks which let him preview the 2016 DNC leaks ten days before they were published, which we shortly thereafter learned was actually due to nobody involved in the story bothering to read the date on the email correctly. The whole entire story, in reality, was that Trump had merely received an email about an already published WikiLeaks drop.

Greenwald writes the following:

Very shortly after CNN unveiled its false story, MSNBC’s intelligence community spokesman Ken Dilanian went on air and breathlessly announced that he had obtained independent confirmation that the CNN story was true. In a video segment I cannot recommend highly enough, Dilanian was introduced by an incredibly excited Hallie Jackson — who urged Dilanian to “tell us what we’ve just now learned,” adding, “I know you and some of our colleagues have confirmed some of this information: What’s up?” Dilanian then proceeded to explain what he had learned:

 

“That’s right, Hallie. Two sources with direct knowledge of this are telling us that congressional investigators have obtained an email from a man named ‘Mike Erickson’ — obviously they don’t know if that’s his real name — offering Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. access to WikiLeaks documents. … It goes to the heart of the collusion question. … One of the big questions is: Did [Trump Jr.] call the FBI?”

 

How could that happen? How could MSNBC purport to confirm a false story from CNN? Shortly after, CBS News also purported to have “confirmed” the same false story: that Trump Jr. received advanced access to the WikiLeaks documents. It’s one thing for a news outlet to make a mistake in reporting by, for instance, misreporting the date of an email and thus getting the story completely wrong. But how is it possible that multiple other outlets could “confirm” the same false report?

That’s three mainstream outlets–CNN, MSNBC, and CBS, all claiming to have independently “confirmed” a story that would have been recognized as false if even one person in any of those outlets had done the tiniest bare minimum of independent investigation into the claim that its source was making, namely looking with their eyeballs at the actual information they were being presented with.

They didn’t, because that’s the state of the mass media today. That is its culture. That, in answer to Greenwald’s question above, is how this could happen: the western mass media are nothing but a bunch of lackeys mindlessly regurgitating incendiary narratives by those in power in their rapacious search for ratings.

Natasha Bertrand is acutely aware of this, which is why she feels comfortable falsely telling the world that her absurd reporting has been “confirmed”.

So now you know. Whenever you see the mass media saying an important claim has been “confirmed”, just ignore them. They have no respect for that word, and it has lost all meaning among their ranks. The western media class does not exist to tell you the truth about the world, it exists to distort your understanding of the world for the advantage of the powerful.

The Real Reason Why Blackstone Is Courting The Pentagon

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Photo credit: Financial Times / Flickr (CC BY 2.0) .

The sudden push by Wall Street’s largest private equity firm to heavily lobby the Pentagon and State Department for largely unspecified reasons is part of an increasingly visible conflict within the U.S. establishment regarding how to handle the Artificial Intelligence “arms race.”

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

One of Wall Street’s largest private equity firms, the Blackstone Group, has been making a series of moves that have left mainstream analysts puzzled, with the most recent being Blackstone’s hire of David Urban, a Washington lobbyist with close ties to the Trump administration.

Blackstone’s courting of a Trump ally was not surprising given that the firm’s CEO, Steven Schwarzman, recently donated $3 million to Trump’s re-election efforts and had previously chaired the President’s now-defunct Strategic and Policy Forum of “business leaders” and advisors. The close ties that have developed between Schwarzman and Trump following the latter’s election in late 2016 have led mainstream media to describe Schwarzman as a confidant of the President.

However, what was odd about Blackstone’s hiring of David Urban was its murky reason for doing so, as the firm plans to task Urban with lobbying the Pentagon and State Department on “issues related to military preparedness and training.” This is odd, as CNBC noted, because Blackstone “doesn’t have any publicly listed government contracts, and its known investments don’t appear to have direct links to the defense industry.” However, Urban has extensive experience in dealing with both Departments in addition to his close ties to the current administration and the fundraising apparatus of the Republican Party.

While media reports on Blackstone’s recent hire of Urban were unable to elucidate the motive behind Blackstone’s sudden desire to court the Pentagon and State Department, they did note that Blackstone’s previous hire of a Trump-connected fundraiser lobbyist, Jeff Miller, had been remarkably successful earlier this year, with Miller lobbying Congress specifically on coronavirus relief legislation like the CARES Act. The CARES Act ultimately allowed private equity giants like Blackstone to access funds designated for coronavirus relief, likely thanks to the efforts of Miller and other lobbyists hired by Blackstone as well as other private equity giants like the Carlyle Group.

Though CNBC was left looking for answers as to Blackstone’s sudden interest in aiding the Pentagon with “military preparedness” and wooing the State Department, the likely motive may be related to other recent moves made by the company, such as the hire of former Amazon and Microsoft executive Christine Feng. Feng, who was hired by Blackstone on August 3, previously led data and analytics mergers and acquisitions at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a contractor to the U.S. intelligence community and other U.S. federal agencies. Previously, Feng was a senior member of Microsoft’s Corporate Development team. Microsoft recently won lucrative contracts for information technology (IT) services and cloud computing for the State Department and Pentagon, respectively.

According to Blackstone executives, the decision to hire Feng was made due to her “deep relationships in Silicon Valley” and “her experience working at Amazon and Microsoft.” They also added that her hire was motivated by Blackstone’s push to “identify new opportunities to invest and partner with innovative companies reshaping the world” and Blackstone’s recent effort to “double down” on tech sector investments. Notably, Feng’s hire came just a few months after Blackstone had hired Vincent Letteri, another tech-focused investor experienced with growth-stage tech companies, and amid a series of recent investments by Blackstone in tech firms, including HealthEdge software and Chinese data center provider 21Vianet, among others.

Schwarzman’s Push for “Common Governance”

It strongly appears that Blackstone’s recent moves, including Urban’s hire, are part of the firm’s bid to become one of the top “innovative companies reshaping the world” as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) arms race becomes a key driver in the “reshaping” of the global economy. Blackstone’s Steven Schwarzman is a key part of the relatively tight-knit group of billionaires and influential political figures, like Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt, that are working to create a “global compact on the research, introduction, and deployment of AI,” and Schwarzman has heralded the coming age of AI as representing a “fourth revolution” for humanity.

Schwarzman argued for greater global collaboration on AI-driven technologies, particularly between the U.S. and China, in a July 2020 Op-Ed for Yahoo! Finance where he wrote that the establishment of “common governance structures” for the research, introduction and deployment of AI is necessary if “we are to avoid the negative consequences of AI,” ultimately comparing the current pace of development of AI to that of past arms races, such as those involving nuclear and biological weapons. Per Schwarzman, these “common governance structures” would produce “explicit global commitments, agreements, and eventually international laws with consequences for violation” that relate directly to AI and its use.

Blackstone’s head is convinced that these “common governance structures” should be built between the U.S. and China, hence his heavy investment in universities and artificial intelligence education in both countries. For instance, Schwarzman created the Schwarzman Scholars program in 2016 where around 100-200 students from around the world pursue a Master’s Degree in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing annually. The official goal of the program, which was modeled after the Rhodes Scholars program, is to “create a growing network of global leaders that will build strong ties between China and the rest of the world.” The program’s advisors include former Secretary of States Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as former World Bank President James Wolfensohn and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and Goldman Sachs executive Henry Paulson. Schwarzman has also donated hundreds of millions of dollars to create an AI-focused institute at Oxford University.

Then, in the U.S., Schwarzman gave $350 million to MIT, prompting the school to create the Schwarzman College of Computing, which aims to specifically “address the global opportunities and challenges presented by the ubiquity of computing — across industries and academic disciplines — and by the rise of artificial intelligence.” MIT News later noted that “the impulse behind the founding of the college came from trips he [Schwarzman] had taken to China, where he observed intensified Chinese investment in artificial intelligence, and wanted to make sure the U.S. was also on the leading edge of A.I.” The college’s inauguration also featured Henry Kissinger as a speaker, where Kissinger mulled the potential impacts of AI and stated that “AI makes it technically possible, easier, to control your population.”

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, credits Schwarzman’s lead to invest in AI education in the U.S. and abroad as determining “the future of American philanthropy.” “Steve’s donation triggered an arms race among all the universities to match him. This is the next trend in philanthropy, in my view,” Schmidt told Axios regarding Schwarzman’s MIT donation last May. Schmidt also stated that his own investment in Princeton University’s Computer Science department had been prompted by Schwarzman’s previous acts of “AI philanthropy.”

Last May, a federal commission that Schmidt chairs, called the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI), produced a document that was obtained by a FOIA request earlier this year. One particularly important page made a point that was essentially repeated in Schwarzman’s July Op-Ed regarding a “global AI compact.” Titled “The Importance of a US/China AI Cooperation,” it begins with a quote from Kissinger, a key advisor to and “great friend” of Schmidt, about the need for “arms control negotiation” for AI and then states that “the future of [AI] will be decided at the intersection of private enterprise and policy leaders between China and the US.” In other words, the Schmidt-chaired NSCAI argues that the future of AI will be determined by the political leaders and business leaders of China and the U.S. The page also adds that “we [The United States] risk being left out of the discussions where norms around AI are set for the rest of our lifetimes. Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, and Microsoft will not be.”

This is particularly significant given the NSCAI is tasked with making recommendations to the federal government regarding how to move forward with AI regulations within the context of “national security” and its members include key members of the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence community and Silicon Valley behemoths that double as contractors to the U.S. military, U.S. intelligence or both. One of the NSCAI’s interests, per the FOIA-obtained document, is the use of “AI in diplomacy,” suggesting that it also seeks to explore potential State Department uses for AI. Notably, earlier this year, and a year after the aforementioned NSCAI document was written, the State Department saw key aspects of its IT infrastructure privatized and given over to NSCAI-linked companies like Microsoft.

The Establishment Divide over AI

Given Schwarzman’s views on AI, his AI-focused “philanthropy,” and Blackstone’s recent pivot towards technology, it becomes easier to understand why Blackstone has recently hired David Urban to lobby the Department of Defense and the State Department. Over the last few years, Schwarzman ally Eric Schmidt has “reinvented himself as the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the national security community” through his chairing of the NSCAI and other positions and has been lobbying “to revamp America’s defense forces with more engineers, more software and more A.I.” Blackstone’s plans to use David Urban to woo the Pentagon are likely directly related to these efforts to speed up and determine not just when but how the U.S. military adopts A.I-driven technologies, particularly regarding the degree of collaboration with China.

Schwarzman, Schmidt, Kissinger and their allies, as pointed out above, appear to favor direct collaboration with China regarding A.I., seeing it as better for business and the best way to avert “catastrophe.” This is particularly true for Schwarzman who has close business ties to China and has been described as “Trump’s China whisperer” by mainstream media. Indeed, Schwarzman and Blackstone have completed numerous, multi-billion dollar deals in China, with a Hong Kong-based publication even claiming that “Schwarzman has become the go-to man for Chinese buyers.” In addition, Schwarzman has a strong personal relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and is credited with softening Trump’s rhetoric and stance on certain issues related to China since 2017. Part of the reason for this, per Henry Kissinger, owes to Schwarzman’s “unique standing” in China where Schwarzman has “done so many useful things.”

Despite his close ties to Schwarzman, Trump has sent mixed signals regarding how much of Schwarzman’s advice regarding China he will take. Trump’s tendency, in public anyway, has been to bolster the nationalist rhetoric of the cadre of neoconservatives and other figures who compose the Committee on the Present Danger, China (CPDC), chief among them former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

Bannon and other CPDC figures have described Schwarzman as a “rival,” with Bannon specifically singling Schwarzman out, asserting that the Blackstone founder threatened to “undo his efforts” at guiding the President towards more nationalist policies popular with his base, such as fighting an “economic war” with China. Bannon’s concerns are also echoed by some hardliners in the Trump administration and the Pentagon who, like Bannon, view China as an existential threat to U.S. hegemony and, therefore, “national security.”

Ultimately, with David Urban’s hire, Schwarzman and Blackstone appear to be taking their efforts to shape AI’s future by lobbying the Pentagon and State Department directly in the event that Trump’s nationalistic tendencies threaten their vision of U.S.-China collaboration in AI in the post-Coronavirus world.