John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MIKE WHITNEY IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“There Is No Russian-Saudi Oil War, it’s a US-Saudi War Because the US Can’t/Won’t Cut Production”

“Everyone else cuts production, everyone else sees their revenues shrink, and everyone else pitches-in to put a floor under prices. Everyone except the “exceptional” American oil producers from the exceptional United States. They don’t have to do a damn thing.”

 

Sharing the cuts is indeed a reasonable expectation to have, but when was the last time anyone observed the US doing anything reasonable?

“They don’t care about anyone but themselves.” That could readily serve as the official motto for the country.

The irony is Americans act the same way internally towards their own people in many matters. Outside observers perhaps don’t see that so much, but it is a reality of America.

That’s why there is no healthcare system. That’s why there are so many appalling slums and ghettos. That’s why American primary public education is so weak that in tests, kids in poor little Cuba beat American scores. That’s why American police kill an average of three Americans per day. And that’s why the political system is totally corrupt and serves only the interests of the wealthy.

This is not a nation which cooperates. It is not a nation which shares. And, the truth is, it is not a nation that gives a damn about almost anything.

Part of the true spirit of America was captured in the often-repeated angry words, “Love it or leave it!” yelled at peace demonstrators during the long bloody, pointless Vietnam War.

We have seen many examples of that spirit in the current crises. Everything from keeping sick people in poor countries under severe sanctions to literally seizing medical supplies belonging to other countries. Delaying crucial decisions and arguing with everyone, blundering and lying, America’s leadership has shown no leadership, even to its own people. And no cooperation with others, more concerned about the dark factions that will play a role in its re-election than doing the right things for hundreds of millions of people.

The current crises put America on show as never before for all the world to see. The new perceptions will get built into future global arrangements.

Old Hollywood fantasy notions about America are drying up and blowing away like so much topsoil in the 1930s Dust Bowl.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY W JAMES ANTLE III IN THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE (AND QUICKLY REMOVED BY EDITOR)

 

“A Hawkish Impeachment

“Democrats have inadvertently supplied the template for undermining a future antiwar president”

 

Sorry, I see nothing genuinely anti-war about Trump.

I wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and I am someone who closely follows world affairs through many information sources.

In the beginning, despite the bad taste his personality left in the mouth, I supported him for exactly the reasons of decreasing war and improving relations with Russia.

He has done nothing worth mentioning towards either goal.

I know he has a powerful establishment warning and telling him not to do this or that, but still he makes himself out as tough guy, a rather foul-mouthed one, one who can stand up to anyone, so where are his results?

He has given away, with no legal authority, a good part of Palestine to the most war-mongering government on earth.

He has started new severe hostilities with the government of Iran, a government which threatened no one and is widely known to have met its every obligation under the nuclear agreement Trump arbitrarily tore up, an act again in favor of the world’s most belligerent government.

He has launched war-like sanctions against Iran, causing its innocent people great deprivation and harm, and he accompanied these with serious military threats – the movement of fleets and nuclear bombers – and he even used the indefensible word, “obliterate,” towards Iran’s 80 million people.

He appointed some of the most belligerent men in America to high posts – Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo – from which they did little but threaten and lie.

He has almost turned sanctions and tariffs into a new form of war.

He overthrew an elected government in Bolivia and tried exactly the same in Venezuela, causing great harm to millions of ordinary citizens. He has also stolen Venezuela’s assets abroad, just as he’s stolen Syria’s oil, and laid a deadly blockade causing much hardship for millions.

He completely supports the government of Israel’s unrelenting oppression of millions of Palestinians, never saying a word about matters like the outright ambush killing of several hundred in Gaza.

He loyally supports a murderer Crown Prince. His own CIA Director told him the Prince was responsible for Khashoggi’s grisly murder, but Trump just smiles broadly and is photographed shaking hands with the man, and sells him literally tens of billions of dollars in weapons, certainly a tool for peace in the region, as we see with the killing of thousands of women and children in Yemen.

The favored Prince has also been busy on the home front with violent attacks on Shia Muslim minorities and a huge increase in executions, including even the execution of teenagers.

Trump never says a word against the mass killer running Egypt either. It just happens that Israel is rather fond of Field Marshall el Sisi just as it is of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. Israel’s government likes Arab neighbors who suppress their people.

Trump’s antics in Syria have been close to absurd. He bombed people a couple of times on the basis of clearly falsified chemical-weapons incidents. He withdrew in the northeast only to reoccupy with armored strength Syria’s oil fields, making sophomoric jokes about liking to steal oil. Of course, what he’s really doing is accommodating Israel yet again, to weaken Syria for its postwar rebuilding.

The War in Afghanistan has been a disgrace from the beginning, and Trump still has yet to do one real thing to end it. He talks of a withdrawal, but this reportedly involves a rather small fraction of the American troops there who have done nothing but kill peasants for eighteen years. It’s a cheap gimmick for his election. Not a genuine policy.

Trump of course has threatened many others, from North Korea to Nicaragua and Cuba.

He has continued running tanks up against the Russian border in Europe. He destroyed the INF Treaty, an important part of the international architecture for peace in Europe. He has worked tirelessly to militarize space with the creation of a new branch of America’s military, the so-called Space Force.

This is an anti-war President? You sure could have fooled me.

He has been killing and bombing and threatening and sanctioning for all of his three years. Indeed, with sanctions, he has almost created a new form of hybrid warfare, and he’s using it against almost everyone, traditional friends and opponents, creating animosities and instabilities that could easily break out into new wars.

 

On the nature of Trump’s impeachment, see this just posted:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/12/21/john-chuckman-comment-further-thoughts-on-trumps-impeachment-and-the-extreme-divisions-now-characterizing-american-society/

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON A STRIKING REMINDER OF THE GLORIOUS REALITIES OF AMERICA’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM IN THE MIDDLE EAST

 

Information reported from northeastern Syria starkly displays the utter cynicism and cruelty of America’s position there.

The commander of [American partner] Syrian Kurdish forces in the area has apparently angrily told the United States, “You are not willing to protect [my] people, but you do not want another force to come and protect us. You have sold us. This is immoral.”

“I need to know if you are capable of protecting my people, of stopping these [Turkish] bombs falling on us or not. I need to know, because if you’re not, I need to make a deal with Russia and [Syria] now and invite their planes to protect this region.”

The Turkish invasion has already killed many hundreds of Syrian Kurds. The Kurds are fighting the invading Turks, but the Kurds are comparatively lightly armed, and Turkey is coming on with fighter planes, tanks, and heavy artillery.

Several vicious incidents are reported of Turkish irregular groups shooting unarmed Kurds, prisoners and a well-known woman politician.

American forces sit back watching while the very people they have been working with, the Syrian Kurds, are bombed and shot by an American ally, Turkey, in an effort to make Turkey happy.

Turkey is being allowed to do just enough killing of Syrian Kurds to reassure itself about its own border security, because, after all, Turkey is a key ally in NATO and one with whom there have been some recent unpleasant disagreements, but don’t let the Syrian Kurds turn to the government of Syria and its Russian ally to fight against invasion from Turkey.

After all, America’s plan for hiving off this chunk of someone else’s country – to weaken Syria for Israel’s benefit, the main purpose of the long ugly proxy war killing half a million in Syria – are being changed only to the extent that a big slice of northeastern Syria will become effectively part of Turkey.

The various public threats the United States has been making against Turkey and sanctions it is calling for are intended only to limit the depth of Turkey’s invasion, not to stop it. They serve also as a public relations exercise so as to not seem to be doing what you are in fact doing.

Trump gets to make noise for the hometown election crowd about withdrawing some American forces while in fact doing virtually nothing, moving a few troops around in order to let Turkey come in and do some killing.

The Syrian Kurds, with whom the United States has been working illegally inside Syria, and whom it refers to as an “ally,” are left to absorb a Turkish invasion of their homes while being told not to seek help elsewhere.

Although it is hard to have too much sympathy for the Syrian Kurds because they have in fact betrayed what was their own country, Syria, by working with America to help break it up.

Such are the glorious realities of America’s fight for freedom in the Middle East.

 

NOTE:

I tend to doubt Trump will have much political success here because his belly-over-the-belt political base, the ones who wear red MAGA hats on shopping trips to Walmart, the border-wall crowd, are not the same people who supported him to get out of the Middle East wars.

He still has done nothing real about America’s vicious, cynical wars.

 

LATE DEVELOPMENT:

Later, the same day I wrote this piece, we have from Aljazeera:

“Syrian government troops will deploy along the border with Turkey to help Kurdish fighters fend off Ankara’s military offensive in northern Syria, the Kurdish-led administration in the region has announced.”

“The move, announced on Sunday, represents a major shift in alliance for Syria’s Kurds and came hours after the United States said it was withdrawing its troops from the area to avoid getting caught in the middle of the fast-escalating conflict.”

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO A (REPEAT) ARTICLE BY DMITRY ORLOV IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

‘Our Banner of Deceit is Leading the US to Failure

‘”Lies beget other lies, and pretty soon unbiased intelligence-gathering, rational analysis and proper mission planning become impossible.”’

 

https://russia-insider.com/en/christianity/our-banner-deceit-leading-us-failure/ri21135

 

You know, we have another archive article repeated today in Russia Insider, a very good and accurate one about the monopoly tendencies of the American economy.  (“Almost Every Sector of the US Economy Is a Monopoly or an Oligopoly” by Michael Snyder)

I view it as closely related to this excellent piece by Dmitry Orlov on mainline news sources and international affairs, even though its subject is quite another topic.

Both deal with the effects of great, unbalanced power.

Virtually no one in the world likes monopolies.

Their impact on the economy somewhat resembles the impact of dictatorship on the political life of a nation.

And no one embraces dictatorship as a general governing principle.

But in international affairs, somehow, a number of people seem to believe it is perfectly okay to have a form of dictatorship.

If dictatorship is bad for a country’s political life and is bad, in the form of monopoly, for a country’s economic life, how can it possibly be beneficial in world affairs?

It cannot be.

Yet today, as perhaps never before, we have America working industriously towards enforcing its will over almost everyone on the planet. Threats, financial pressures, unwarranted tariffs, arbitrary demands, displays of military force, and sanctions everywhere.

You know, sanctions, a word which sounds almost harmless to the untutored ear, have been described as just war by other means, and that is a deadly accurate description.

Sanctions represent a particularly ugly form of war. They are indiscriminate weapons, much like massive carpet bombing, and they always and everywhere hurt mainly the poor and defenceless.

Indeed, for sanctions really to be effective, that is exactly what they must do, strike the great mass of defenseless people – the poor, the sick, the old, women and children – bringing immense pressure on any government.

I generally don’t like using religious terms to describe things in the world of political power, but the word “evil” seems unavoidable to me in the matter of sanctions.

And what do you know, you only have to briefly watch and listen to the brutal people pushing them vigorously to confirm absolutely the perception of evil – people like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Elliot Abrams, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Simply unconscionable liars and ruthless killers, every one of them.

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Trump’s direct engagement with North Korea is the first big idea on the file in decades

“Much as only President Nixon could go to China, perhaps only Trump could go to North Korea”

 

Concerning any international issue, it, of course, never hurts to talk.

But what seems so obvious and fitting a concept as talking has never really taken hold in Washington. Never.

Does America talk to Venezuela? Does America talk to Iran? Does America talk to Syria? Does it talk to Cuba? Does America talk to Nicaragua? Does it even talk much with Russia? Or China?

No, America seems to prefer shouting at people, telling them what it wants to see them doing, and very frequently, it threatens them.

It does that not just with its unilaterally-declared opponents – countries regarded as opponents for no other reason than that they follow their own national interests rather than putting America’s first – it does it also with friends and allies, countries like Germany or Turkey or the EU or India.

Such countries receive somewhat less harsh treatment, but they are told what they may buy and from whom, and they are told to enforce the American domestic laws called sanctions as though they had some international legitimacy beyond the threat of military force and financial blackmail used to enforce them, and they are just generally told what is expected of them in a great many matters.

It is arrogant and patronizing behavior, as any impartial witness may plainly see in an instant, but America is used to being arrogant and patronizing on a rather colossal scale, treating whole regions that way, the Middle East being a prime example where not one country does not receive orders and expectations from Washington.

We’re seeing a whole new round of arrogant and patronizing behavior right now with Jared Kushner’s “Deal of the Century” flim-flam marketing operation. The fate of millions of people, held for decades against their will by Israel, enjoying no rights of any kind, not even the right to secure home and farm ownership, and subjected to life-long abuse and harassment with check-points, passes, line-ups, and raids – all offered with a keen eye to making them so miserable they’ll want to leave – is somehow to be settled without so much as consulting them.

It is an operation in which tens of billions of phantom dollars (there being no actual funds held by anyone) from America’s Gulf State tyrant friends are supposed to generate, over a period of many years, a new Palestinian prosperity, without changing any of the realities which now keep Palestinians down.

An operation led by an extremely arrogant man whose very position reflects his father-in-law’s nepotism and distrust of outsiders plus an intimate friendship with the Palestinians’ most vindictive enemy, the current Prime Minister of Israel. Kushner is a man, moreover, possessing absolutely no suitable expertise, education, or experience, and a man who, early on, pronounced from on high that the Palestinians were in fact not ready to govern themselves. Sounds very promising, does it not?

Of course, a great irony of Washington’s ordering other countries about is that so often Washington’s orders are badly misguided and its expectations unrealistic. They prove to be damaging long-term because Washington simply does not understand local realities, realities that will still be there decades later. It refuses to do so if they don’t fit into Washington’s idea of how things should be. It is a form of madness. And of course, repeated enough times, it confirms the old saying about, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

There are many examples. Perhaps the most glaring is Afghanistan and a nearly twenty-year war against the Taliban that has utterly failed. Countless lives and huge amounts of wealth have been squandered on pointless destruction. America never has understood what the Taliban are. They are not “terrorists,” they are not outsiders imposing themselves on others, a role pretty much reserved for America itself. No, they are simply one of the natural divisions in the society. Expecting them to go away is like expecting Baptists or Democrats in America to go away.

And the Taliban had no role in 9/11. They gave refuge to a devout Muslim by the name of Osama bin Laden whose native country, Saudi Arabia, greatly disliked him. When the United States demanded his extradition after 9/11, the Taliban only asked for some evidence, providing credible evidence being a normal part of every proper international extradition request. The United States said no and shortly invaded the place. That is how much sense the war in Afghanistan made from the very start.

America bombed the crap out of the country while its local ally, the clans of the Northern Alliance, traditional opponents of the Taliban, did most of the fighting on the ground. America terrorized countless towns and villages with heavily-armed patrols breaking into homes and removing the men for brutal interrogation, it installed another government, one from members of the Northern Alliance, no more admirable to Western eyes than the Taliban, and it committed, or allowed others to commit, a great many atrocities.

Along the way, in toppling the Taliban government, America released massive new waves of hard drugs into the world, drugs the Taliban had suppressed with its ban on growing opium poppies. The damage of that is felt to this day with large supplies lowering street prices and increasing addictions while urban gang wars are waged over turf, often making news of a weekend’s shooting toll in major American cities resemble reports from a war. A toll of as many as sixty or so shot in one weekend in Chicago, as just one example, has become common.

But did the United States defeat the Taliban? No, they remain a major player with whom the United States only now finally holds serious secret negotiations. Did they even capture bin Laden? No, he was finally murdered years later in Pakistan but even then, only because of a betrayal, not American military or intelligence skill.

Did the United States, after all of that, ever even prove to us that bin Laden was “the mastermind” of 9/11? No, it has never provided genuine evidence of anything, including what actually happened on 9/11. To this day, we honestly do not know. Yet none of that prevented it starting a long and unproductive war, a war it still has not extricated itself from.

(On 9/11 and the lack of any coherent explanation for it, see: https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2016/09/11/john-chuckman-comment-a-survivor-says-even-the-simplest-questions-around-911-have-not-been-answered-by-government-yes-and-some-disturbing-truths-around-those-events-the-saudi-arabian-nonsense/ )

Do we have some sense of déjà vu here, as in going back to the ten-year long mass slaughter in Vietnam which proved only that a poor but determined people can defeat the United States so long as it refrains from using atomic weapons? It certainly threw everything else it had at the Vietnamese, killing an estimated three million of them and leaving their country a nightmare of Agent Orange, landmines, and bomb craters.

That kind of ugly stuff unfortunately characterizes much of the foreign affairs history of the United States since WWII. One colonial war after another, and none of them achieving much except a great deal of death and destruction. Hatreds and hostilities on a grand scale serving no purpose other than to enforce America’s claim to the world that it is free to do as it damn well pleases anywhere.

There are lots of other examples. All the years of severe hostilities and genuine acts of terror against Cuba, and, more than half a century later, these are being stoked up yet again, Washington not able to absorb the fact that what people in other places want to do with their lives and resources may well be at odds with what America demands.

The seventy years of horror in Israel/Palestine provide another example. The United States could have put an end to all of that at any time by declaring proper borders and enforcing them, but it didn’t, and it still doesn’t. It just allows a long and destructive set of hostilities continue unimpeded, every once in a while, dabbling in some kind of silly “peace process” theatrics. In this case, America is involved through the American colonial identity of Israel and what it attempts to do in the Middle East. And America makes sure there are mountains of armaments to do it with.

For some reason Trump has chosen to talk to North Korea, but I’m not sure it has a great deal of meaning. After all, this is Donald Trump we are talking about here.

The same man leaked secret British diplomatic papers have just revealed is viewed as “inept,” “incompetent” and “erratic.” His policies towards Iran are actually called “incoherent.” I think we knew those things before the leak of state papers, but it is still nice to have confirmation.

I do think that apart from talking, Trump has totally failed in North Korea with what he originally aimed for, denuclearization. The North might make some concessions in exchange for American concessions, but it is not going to give up its nukes, and I think America’s establishment may be starting to understand that.

North Korea will not give up on its nukes, especially now that America is seen so clearly as a country which does not honor legal contracts, as in the glaring examples of tearing-up the Iran nuclear agreement and tearing-up the INF Treaty with Russia. That last is a terribly important treaty for Europe to avoid becoming the immediate battleground in a nuclear conflict. What incentive is there for a country like North Korea?

With its well-equipped army on the southern border and its regular war games and with nuclear weapons stashed in Japan and Guam, America represents a serious, ongoing threat to the North, and the North would be foolish to give up all its weapons. The United States has made no concessions to reduce the ever-present threat it represents while making all kinds of extreme demands.

Indeed, I think it is largely the credible nature of the North’s deterrent that saved it from Trump’s initial huge wave of gunboat diplomacy with aircraft carriers and nuclear bombers everywhere, just exactly what we now see arrayed against non-nuclear, law-abiding Iran.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA TODAY

 

In a way, Trump is worse and more dangerous than a typical liar

But I’m not sure Trump even knows when he is lying.

Basically, as we’ve seen and heard from him in so many matters, Trump’s reality is whatever he wants it to be.

It’s a mental condition, not unlike psychopathy.

He is happy with the tales he tells, and he expects others to be happy with them, too. When they are not, he just insults them, calling them liars or other nasty names.

I think the only safety for the world from a man like this lies in the fact that he is unable to act on many of his tales. The establishment lets him rant on, but indeed blunts any of his acts that it doesn’t regard as in keeping with its pre-existing agenda. Unfortunately for countless millions of ordinary people, that pre-existing agenda is itself also threatening.

America wants nothing so much as a return to the 1950s, or rather a return to the relative importance of America in the world of that time, to the respect that it enjoyed then, because the world has grown away from a reality once so comfortable for America. The trouble is that the effort to return to that world can only involve aggression, threats, Mafia-like pressures and extortions because it is something entirely artificial being imposed, something going against many natural developments of the last seventy-five years.

This is what we are seeing right now, whether it’s America telling Europe where it can buy its natural gas or telling China how it should sell its products or telling third countries that they should not buy any of Russia’s military technology or allowing its colony of Israel literally to seize the homes and assets of Palestinians, or telling countries like Venezuela who they should elect so that resources can be treated the way America wants them treated.

This is the vision for our near-term future, and what is Trump’s role in it?

Trump can be seen now as frantically trying to retain his job as President. Much like a drowning man waving his arms and splashing desperately. He actually tries now to outdo the establishment with its own agenda as a way to demonstrate his usefulness to them and to ward off the threat he is under. Nothing of the few sensible changes Trump first offered, changes the establishment regarded as threatening, is going to be realized. The tiny change he recently offered in Syria, for example, has already been distorted into something  beyond recognition.

After all, official agencies of the American government, set to work by the previous administration and portions of his own party did try to unseat him, and he remains threatened by ongoing investigation. He knows that the threat isn’t just about supposed collusion with Russia, which has always been a dark fairy tale which tried to exploit America’s throbbing hangover from the Cold War.

However, Russophobia in general isn’t just that. It is the implicit recognition of Russia as a stumbling block to America’s reassertion of world dominance, an extremely important point. I think Russia is viewed in Washington much as ancient Carthage was viewed by the rulers of the Roman Empire, clearly a very dangerous perspective.

And America is reinforced in that view by those running its powerful colony in the Middle East. That is how they, too, see Russia, as a stumbling block to America’s complete dominance, the situation they embrace as best for their own interests.

This chaotic, dishonest, and raging man, Trump, has a closet bulging with skeletons, and a well-resourced investigation could come up with any number of them. Embarrassment or indictment or forced resignation rather than impeachment are definitely ongoing possibilities for him, and here is an ego that regards itself as just too big to fail.

The fact that this bizarre man was elected tells us something about America, and that is that there are tens of millions who feel powerless, who feel no one really represents them. There is a good deal of desperation.

And they are absolutely right to feel the way they do, but they only added to the list of their own woes by electing a man who can do nothing for them and whose recklessness is shaping up itself as extremely dangerous – in Venezuela, In Syria, in Palestine, in Iran, in Yemen, in North Korea, and in a list of other places.

The government of a world empire, one working to redouble its authority over others, has next to no use for the ordinary people of its own country, except when it comes to filling uniforms, but Trump pretends that he has because the belly-over-the-belt set are his people, his political base. That’s why, while other promises are forgotten, “the wall” has not been – that costly, pretty much pointless project means a lot to “his people.” Depriving him of it provides a natural path to weakening him for the 2020 election. Hard to see any compromise possible there.

The threat of war is as constant now as it was under Obama, and I believe it is becoming even more so. After all, even if Trump cannot decide everything as he likes to pretend he does, he still influences the international situation, its tone and direction, and he adds only more instability and recklessness.

And in China, the same recklessness has already started serious aspects of economic war. This is unbelievably dangerous to the health of world society, given the many economic weaknesses we see, especially in the United States, with debts and deficits and various bubbles generated by low interest rates and artificially pumped-up liquidity.

His grand illusion of “Make America Great Again” – just a re-tread of the now-irrelevant “American Dream” slogan – is causing buttons to be pushed that were best left untouched. The establishment knows his slogan is rubbish, but they are using him to undercut China, a country they resent and fear and a country they have wanted to undercut for a long time. It was Obama, answering to the same masters, who spoke of a “pivot to Asia.”

China is definitely on a natural path to becoming the world’s premier nation, and if there is anything the American establishment can do to torpedo that, it will. Trump and his economically-illiterate talk of China stealing American jobs is useful. Of course, no one is going to start closing factories in China and reopening them in America – Trump’s foggy-brained vision of the future – but attacking China so relentlessly can slow it down, something America’s newly assertive establishment views as useful.

The simple goal of the people who really run America is to reassert their authority worldwide. They cannot do that through economic competition anymore and they cannot do it through the immense respect America once enjoyed after WW II, but they sure can work on the military and financial and foreign policy fronts to become a more threatening bully that makes incessant demands and seizes opportunities as they come along.

They are working hard to undermine the elected government in Venezuela in part because the guy they have lined up as “leader” there has promised he would sell off the government’s big petroleum assets. But it’s more than just that. Venezuela is just one piece in a large puzzle. America wants a return in Latin America also to the 1950s, a time when an unquestioning giant plantation system was dominated by American-compliant governments. Cuba is very much back on the list of targets after Venezuela, as are several other states. The “Lima Group” is just one more Cold War-style front organization for getting what you want from others. They help do your dirty work, giving your arrogant demands an appearance of wider respectability, in return for favors and considerations. Hitler’s willing helpers, as it were. Something of the same role Israel enjoys in the Middle East.

Serious world economic collapse is not just a dark fantasy, it is a real possibility, given the many frailties we see. Things are now slowing in China. Things are slowing in Germany. Europe is rife with division. None of the American establishment has been willing to bear the least burden to rebalance things in America, to correct dangerous excesses. Instead of paying the taxes they should have to pay down debt, they received more outrageous tax cuts. It is behavior which almost exactly parallels that of the great dukes and churchmen of France in the years leading to the French Revolution.

In this they are blood brothers, Trump and the Washington establishment. Trump’s entire career is one of fighting taxes and taking unfair advantages with no regard for the consequences to others and society at large. Trump’s personal real estate empire reflects the efforts over years of accountants and tax lawyers constantly battling government more than it does anything else. He has been a decades-long chiseller in slow motion, which is why he refused to release his tax records.

So, too, in military matters. Overwhelmingly, these establishment people avoided military service, as Trump very much did at the very height of horrors in Vietnam. The guy who regularly has his picture taken in custom-made bomber jackets and other military gear welcomed no opportunity to wear them when they weren’t just political costumes.  He’ll hug the flag for countless photo-ops, but it never occurred to him to risk anything personal for it.

But the American establishment is always ready to send others off to war to inflict God-knows-what on the poor people of the world. They do it in the name of “freedom,” but they mean only the freedom to control and exploit. That’s what those American flag lapel pins they all insist on wearing really mean.

And the costliest, least economically-beneficial institution in America, the military and its associated security establishment, just keeps getting more money than it knows what to do with. It now consumes more than a trillion dollars a year. This works towards the large economic threat, but it also adds still more to the threat of war. Great standing military machines have always in the past proved to be agents for war, not for peace.