John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“The Cultural Problem of Cheating & Lying”

“This is not just a lesson for parents, schools, the courts, and the marketplace. It is also a necessary lesson for our politics. But we have not managed to come up with a way to vet our leaders so as to assure their long-term honesty and integrity — a process we have been searching for since the time of Plato. Nonetheless, we should try harder…”

 

Yes, indeed, but I do find the piece weak and rather squishy, avoiding as it does the real source of the problem and putting things into philosophical terms of a search for ways to insure truth in American politics and in the wider society. It actually gets quite preachy, but preaching doesn’t change the real political economy of a huge state, and, indeed, I think it effectively offers a kind false hope to hide behind.

A little like the people in America who periodically stand in a crowd on a hillside with their arms outstretched in a kind of supplication, waiting for the Second Coming. They are sincere, to be sure, I have no doubt, but their efforts are utterly pointless since they ignore science and the realities of the human condition.

There are bricks-and-mortar causes for the ailments of American society, and if you refuse to deal with those, you are in a very real sense lying to yourself and just adding to the total volume of American lying.

Given America’s empire and the vast and costly military/security services supporting it, I don’t think there is any option but for leaders to lie, and doing so almost continuously. The emergence of American plutocracy, which is what the empire serves, and money-driven politics at home are at the heart of the problem.

Can America’s leaders in Washington openly admit that they are starving children and depriving the sick of medicine in Iran and Venezuela and were working to do the same in Bolivia and still other places?

Even the ugliest, most powerful government officials or the plutocrats they serve do not happily take public credit for such grim acts. So, lying and cheating just become built into the society at the highest level. Almost everyone, no matter how malevolent their intentions and actions, wants at least a veneer of respectability, credit for worthy motives. Only the genuine psychopaths, of which America has more than a few in powerful positions because they are useful, are likely to want such credit, much like credit for scalps on display.

So, destroying someone else’s elected government invariably is transformed into fighting for democratic values. Venezuela’s unelected Guaido, absurdly swearing himself in as President without ever running for election and financing his activities with American intelligence agency funds as well as American-appropriated Venezuelan national assets, becomes the hope for democracy over the party of twice-elected Maduro and his thrice-elected predecessor, Chavez.

Again, except for the scalphunters, who would want credit for shutting down Venezuela’s electricity grid several times so that millions of poor ordinary people likely lost the food in their fridges? And many life-sustaining machines stopped working?

Such are the realities of empire. And there are just so very many examples, the story of Ukraine being a prominent and tragic one in recent years.

According to the delightful Victoria Nuland, a high State Department official who was overheard at the time, America spent five billion dollars on the coup in Ukraine, doing absolutely nothing for Ukraine’s people, overthrowing an elected government, and indeed wrecking the country in many ways. All done just to threaten the security interests of Russia along a huge border. Needless violence and intimidation, with plenty of killing along the way.

Parts of Ukraine seceded under the unpleasant language and cultural policies of the coup-installed government, and I think it pretty unlikely they will ever return. Thousands died in an unnecessary civil war over the matter. Great numbers of people sought work in other parts of Europe as the Ukrainian economy literally collapsed under a corrupt and incompetent American-installed administration.

Versions of neo-Nazism now openly flourish in Ukraine because the groups’ capacity to intimidate the government is useful in preventing any turning back to rational policies. Such groups, some subsidized by the State Department or American security services, threaten the government into not making reasonable concessions for peace.

Incidentally, Joe Biden, in his then role as presidential proconsul to Ukraine, assisting the coup government in getting things right – “right” meaning the way America wants them – was photographed warmly shaking hands with the commander of one such group, the Azov Battalion, a group whose marches much resemble those of Hitler’s Brownshirts of the 1930s.

The post-coup Ukrainian military demonstrated gross incompetence. Despite its far greater numbers and resources, it had poor leadership and lack of motivation and managed only to kill thousands of civilians in breakaway Eastern Ukraine. Its efforts to draft soldiers in Western Ukraine to send to fight in Eastern Ukraine resulted in embarrassingly high levels of running from the draft.

And all the previous coup government leader, Poroshenko, could talk about was how the Russians were invading and how brave Ukrainian soldiers were preventing Europe from being invaded. Absolutely absurd stuff, but our press and politicians credited it as truth. Somehow, with all such claims, the hi-tech, unarguable evidence of America’s fleets of spy satellites and sophisticated radars just manages to disappear. America would in fact know in a heartbeat if Russia invaded Ukraine, and it would not sit silently watching it happen.

So, we not only have thick clots of lies, we have the government of the United States treating us all as though we were totally ignorant of the realities of around-the-clock surveillance.

Perhaps the most grotesque aspect of Ukraine’s post-coup military operations was the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, either in error or deliberately, an event which launched an industrial-sized cover-up with a shameless investigation which never even bothered to collect all the evidence, pieces of the plane and contents still being easily discovered in the region where it crashed. If you study the case, there are many powerful reasons for believing the Ukrainian military shot down the airliner with fighter planes, but imagine the risk to America’s five-billion-dollar coup investment if the truth had been broadcast right away? So, years of throwing dust in people’s eyes began, and now the matter is almost forgotten. And, again, no American satellite images or radar tracks were ever produced.

We have ugly stunt after ugly stunt – such as the infamous Skripal Affair of two years ago in Britain – done merely to hurt the interests of those America does not like. Truth is impossible, and the lying goes beyond all normal bounds to become a massive network of distortions, all dutifully attested to at the highest levels of government and by the corporate press which of course always serves the government which has so regulatory powers over it.

It was after all, Hitler himself in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf, who propounded the concept of “the Big Lie.” It proved a highly successful idea, and tyrants and seekers-after-power have never stopped employing it since.

That is the very nature of empire, and there is no escaping it. It is impossible to behave the way America does and not lie about it, massively and continuously.

I’ve said it many times, but there’s no shame in repeating such an important truth: you can either have a decent country or you can have an empire, but you cannot have both.

The infrastructure of empire is built on threats, oppression, subversion, coups, dishonesty, and no shortage of violence.

And there is always an underlying assumption that a relatively small number of people in the United States are somehow entitled to tell the other more than 95% of humanity how they are to run their affairs. Are you not implicitly lying about your democratic and human-rights values when you do that? Of course, it isn’t America’s roughly 5% of the world’s people making the claim, it’s a tiny fraction of that, the highly privileged.

There’s no way the establishment politicians in Washington – including the best Congress money can buy – can one day just take a kind of Boy Scout Oath to reform things. Believing that goes beyond naïve to asinine.

Fundamental change is required – including basic matters like a tax structure which supports the creation of plutocracy and the grotesque role of money in politics – but I don’t think Americans are prepared to undertake it, and perhaps they are not even able to do so, given the establishment’s powerful tools of self-defense.

Right now, the Democratic Party is working to shut out Bernie Sanders, and it has already pretty much shut out Tulsi Gabbard, yet neither of those two admirable politicians is even advocating large-scale change. That’s a good measure of how risk-averse America’s establishment is.

The other half of America’s money-controlled political duopoly, the Republican Party, supports a foul-mouthed madman who brags about stealing. Why? Because he vigorously continues the good work of imposing America’s will on the planet, and he actively works to hurt those who are going to become important parts of a very different future, as China and Russia.

Well, I believe sadly that America is stuck right where it is until larger events overtake it and the now-emerging multi-polar world becomes the dominant reality.

MAGA will be seen as a museum relic, like some Shaman’s pathetic talisman, representing futile efforts by America to claw its way back to where it was seventy years ago, pretty much king of the world.

Either that, or it is not impossible at all for genuine widespread and destructive war to emerge from America’s present global hostilities almost everywhere.

After all, what do bullies do when their demands are ignored but start throwing punches or using a weapon?

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Trump lauds U.S. economy at Davos as trial set to begin in Washington”

 

It cannot be stressed enough that American impeachment is largely a political act. I’ve written that before, but here is some background to support the claim.

Impeachment was not carefully designed by the Constitution’s authors. They offered only a sketchy outline, perhaps naively believing that the provision would never be required in the brave new world they thought they were creating.

It is in fact just one of many instances where the American Constitution has proved inadequate or outdated in a complex modern world. For it is a world unlike anything the authors could imagine, a point which goes to the difficulty of writing constitutions intended to last for centuries. The Constitution is amendable, but only with much difficulty, a deliberate “safety” feature, but not one well suited to a rapidly changing world.

Its inflexibility in general terms has however never really stopped determined American governments from doing most of the nasty things they want to do. What is the most important part of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, has been ignored or trampled countless times. At least in part that reflects the fact that it costs a lot of money to bring a case before the Supreme Court. That is another of the Constitution’s weaknesses, justice often depends on money.

But it is not just in matters of citizens’ rights that the Constitution is often effectively ignored. American Presidents, now virtually on their own, decide to commit acts of war (the assassination of a foreign leader, for example, or mass missile launches against a country presumed to have crossed some “red line”). Perhaps they briefly consult key members of Congress, but that’s not what the Constitution says you must do for acts of war.

And now, much in the fashion of Roman emperors, American Presidents use Executive Orders to do many of the things they want to do, behavior that is about as far as you can go from the Constitution’s rules. The Founders likely would have been horrified by the term, Executive Order. But, just as with acts of war, the Congress accommodates the President. Much of the “unconstitutional” behavior reflects the fact of America’s global empire and its often exigent needs. It simply is not how the country was designed to operate.

Of course, with a population of more than 330 million and growing, the concept of single set of judges established in Washington near the time of the first American census of 1790, to serve a population of 3.9 million, also has inherent problems. And the world has only grown more litigious and infinitely more complex.

The Founders hoped, perhaps, in a time closely following the Enlightenment with all its new political and scientific attitudes, to create something concise and fundamental in the Constitution – architecture’s Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” – with no extra baggage, but for various reasons, I believe they did not succeed. Constitutions don’t work quite the same way as general scientific principles. They govern dynamic and growing and changing societies – living things.

Where any rule or process is not precisely defined, an intensely political environment always works to shape and manipulate it. In Washington, everything becomes politicized, literally everything, right down to what in normal life would be dull process, such as budgeting. And so it is with impeachment.

There were no true political parties in early America, but there sure are now. They are gigantic and powerful corporations such as the Founders could not have imagined, taking in vast sums of money, and all of American political life revolves around them.

(Perhaps, more precisely put, that would be all of American political life, including the parties, revolves around money, but that gets us into a different topic, one I’ve discussed elsewhere, but it is again something which was not anticipated.)

It is no coincidence that all the impeachment trials have occurred in the modern era, the earliest being Andrew Johnson in 1868, a few years after the Civil War, a time of great partisanship and party loyalties.

Trump, Clinton, and Nixon (who resigned, under advice, rather than endure a vote) are all in the late modern era. More than one politician remarked that Clinton’s impeachment represented a wish by Republicans to get even over Nixon’s impeachment, an observation which again goes to impeachment’s political nature.

The Founders could not have imagined America’s set of relationships with the world two centuries after their work. That America would come to displace the Redcoats and Hessians who represented in American eyes a global tyranny called the British Parliament. What Trump is accused of having done, and I certainly believe he did, could not even have occurred in early America.

If Impeachment is largely political in nature, claims on all sides can be “right,” and it comes down to who has the votes. There is no precise body of law and only a small, generalized list of charges to which to refer. The Constitution offers as an impeachment “penal code” only the words, “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” with the last part not even defined.

By the way, “all sides being right” rather nicely fits in with America’s prevailing political culture where all sides have their own truths, and there are no verities or universally accepted authorities. There is no truth, only sets of attitudes.

Trump’s just-developed line of defense has been summed up as “abuse of power is not impeachable.” That may even be legally and technically correct. But of course, for the rest of world, it is a ridiculous and dangerous-sounding proposition, especially when it concerns such a powerful country as America, yet some very prominent lawyers in Washington are saying it.

I do think that gives us a terrible insight into what a cloudcuckooland America has become. In the most powerful country in the world, abuse of power may not be considered impeachable.

It’s not just Trump, loud and extremely rude as he is. Others have enabled him, powerful Americans contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to his campaign war chest, which is filled to overflowing for the next election, and tens of millions of ordinary Americans voted for him. America just may be a ruder, more uncouth place than many appreciate.

It does seem the country is almost incapable of rational behavior anymore. The rule of law, that most fundamental building block of all civil society, is ignored by American leaders. Assassinations have become common practice, as have threats and aggressive wars and engineered coups. Sanctions, which are American laws which should apply only to Americans, are applied to all the world’s people, hurting tens of millions of innocents.

Constant lies are required to cover or attempt to explain away all of the criminal behavior. International trade and economic relationships are being destroyed by trying to put America first, ahead of all others. International treaties and agreements are being destroyed (the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Iran Nuclear Agreement, the Outer Space Treaty, and the Open Skies Treaty and Strategic Arms Treaty with Russia are under threat) simply because America does not want to be bound by them. International organizations are being attacked or undermined – the UN (the US owes more than a billion dollars in back dues and often breaks its solemn treaty obligation to issue visas to leaders needing to come to New York), UNESCO (the US simply quit), the ICC (whose judges were openly threatened by a high American official), the WTO, the IJC, the OPCW, etc., etc.

International chaos is being actively promoted by Trump and much of the American political establishment. I only wish an impeachment conviction could halt or seriously impair those efforts, but I fear that it cannot.

John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP GIRALDI IN THE UNZ REVIEW

“America the Repugnant. Assassinating Foreign Leaders Is an Act of War”

“Assassinating Foreign Leaders Is an Act of War”

Absolutely, there is no other logical or ethical way of looking at it.

But when you function as a global imperial power, treating entire countries as pawns and putting everyone’s interests after your own, it’s not hard to see how you could start thinking of political murder in god-like terms of just tidying up a bit.

It’s part of the sickness of empire, the near total corruption that comes with near total power.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY THE LATE ROBERT PARRY REPUBLISHED IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“An apology & Explanation, Two Years On”

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/29/an-apology-and-explanation-two-years-on/
 

“Facts and logic no longer mattered. It was a case of using whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent.”

 

Indeed.

And I think that reflects the general decline and corruption of the United States’ establishment. The observations are not just things found in the country’s politics or journalism.

Look at the long record abroad of wars and coups, killing millions and serving no good purpose, plus all the lying and hypocrisy required to support them.

Are they the handiwork of a sound, productive society? Of enlightened leadership? Of strong national values? Respect for the rule of law?

America’s establishment – which consists of both political parties plus their financial supporters and the corporate press plus other institutional helpers – really no longer has a lot worth saying to anyone.

It does pretty much as it pleases with little regard for the bulk of American citizens and none at all for the other 95% of humanity.

Only the existence of a small number of other fairly powerful states prevents it becoming completely tyrannical.

It is a global version of what the French Aristocracy was in the late 18^th century, an era of immense privilege and abuse.

Any notions of dedication to democratic ideals are fanciful. People with that kind of power don’t give it up, either through elections or principled acts.

And agencies like the Pentagon and the CIA and the FBI operate under principles the polar opposite of democracy. The more pervasive and powerful they are in a society, the less it can possibly be democratic.

America’s establishment serves a plutocracy, the people who pay its bills.

At home, it runs an elaborate and costly political system which has some appearance of democracy but with a basic unspoken rule that most of the establishment and all of the plutocratic corporations and individuals cannot be replaced or adversely affected.

There is a corollary rule that indeed nothing in the society is to be greatly changed.

But in its imperial efforts abroad – its wars, its coups, its sanctioning, its threatening – even that pretence of democracy is dropped.

How can you be democratic and treat countless millions and their governments as though they were your property? Perhaps the attitude that you can is a holdover from America’s long years of slavery?

The parties impose empire on the world and shovel money at destructive, completely anti-democratic institutions like the Pentagon and CIA and FBI who are their willing helpers.

Change will only come with decline and replacement by new global arrangements whose sketchy outlines already are to be seen.

John Chuckman

FURTHER COMMENT ON THE TRUMP IMPEACHMENT

 

There many extreme claims on the Internet about the impeachment of Donald Trump.

The House investigation and official impeachment are even called a “coup.”

The rhetoric is unhelpful and divisive. At an extremely divisive time in American history, and I don’t mean divisive just because of the impeachment, the last thing the country needs is more volatile rhetoric and division, practices to which Trump has been especially devoted.

Trump has done a great deal to pollute the country’s political environment. He is responsible for a major dump of toxic sludge, though he cannot be impeached for doing that.

Division is part of Trump’s operating style. Divide and conquer, one measure of a really unprincipled leader. His ready aptitude for calling people names and laughing at them is right out of Archie Bunker.

Some of the impeachment rhetoric is just childish, as that from Senator Lindsey Graham and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell telling everyone ahead of time how they will not carry out their duties with impartiality or proper procedure.

A Supreme Court justice of some distinction and standing, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has said that the Supreme Court could simply remove Senators who have declared prejudices beforehand. Going into the proceedings, which are a Constitutional obligation, with open prejudice and intent to torpedo a fair trial is not something to be tolerated.

Hardly desirable for Trump supporters, the Lindsey Graham approach represents flirting with the removal of pro-Trump votes from the Senate trial. Perhaps that is a good measure of the American Right’s extremely poor judgment. But ideologues do tend to be fanatics, and fanaticism is another factor contributing to America’s division.

Are there past public statements on virtually any topic by a politician like Lindsey Graham that stand up to scrutiny? I think not. He represents one of the best examples of establishment corruption and bias in American government.

Let me say that I very much believe Obama and Hillary Clinton did try to prevent or negate Trump’s. election. Given their backgrounds, it should surprise no one. Dark figures, both of them. The FBI and CIA at the highest level were used. That is, indeed, unconstitutional activity by people sworn to defend the American Constitution, an oath which today means remarkably little.

But the imperialists of America’s establishment, which include both parties, can hardly be blamed for bringing home ugly practices used for many decades against many other countries. Practices with which the privileged of both parties have become completely at-ease.

The Constitution gives little guidance on the matter of impeachment. The guidance it does give has been closely followed by the House in carrying out its duties of investigation and indictment.

People claim that the charges against Trump could have been laid against many other presidents. That may well be, but it represents an irrelevant accusation. Prosecutors in our legal system always have considerable latitude about those to be indicted for crimes. Just as police have considerable latitude about laying charges.

Indeed, a great many crimes never result in charges or indictments or trials, and there are many reasons for that. Plea-bargaining, for example, is a major tool of the criminal justice system. Without it, far fewer cases would be cleared.

No one is in a position to tell the House of Representatives what it should do in such matters or how it should carry out its Constitutional obligations. It assumes the political risks that its acts incur, and that’s about all you can say with any meaning.

The American Constitution is, in fact, a very flawed and incomplete document, despite fervent claims to the contrary by Patriot religious zealots. On the topic of impeachment of a president, it doesn’t say much more than the that House is responsible for investigation and indictment and the Senate for conducting a trial on the House’s indictment.

It makes cursory reference to “high crimes and misdemeanors,” that last term being especially vague. In today’s body of law, “misdemeanors” include such ordinary matters as public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and reckless driving.

Such an interpretation would indeed qualify almost every past president for trial. Maybe some of the earnest types who created the Constitution would have been satisfied with that, but it seems patently ridiculous in today’s terms.

Especially when we are talking about the operations of a global empire which could not even have been imagined by any Founding Father and would have been rejected by perhaps all of them. Virtually all the words they wrote apply to a country completely unlike the one America has become. The garments of long ago are outgrown.

The Constitution here, as in so many matters – including the anti-democratic Electoral College, the means for electing a number of minority presidents, including Trump – is badly flawed. Criticize it if you wish or start a political movement to amend it, but you cannot condemn, ipso facto, those acting according to its precepts.

Impeachment in America is essentially a political act and always has been. With impeachment, we have a procedure having little to do with the body of law. The modern era’s use of impeachment is a measure of how much the country has changed. Originally, there were no political parties. Today, they are the vehicles of power.

The political nature of impeachment is so for many reasons, including the selection of those to be investigated, the “jurors” in the Senate not being selected and being responsible for their trial votes only to the voters in their local constituencies, the lack of any detailed procedures or rules in the Constitution, and the lack of any court of appeal.

Trump’s call to a foreign leader requesting actions against a political opponent must be viewed as troubling by anyone. If Joe Biden committed inappropriate acts in Ukraine, and likely he did, there are proper avenues for investigating him. They don’t include a president calling another president, asking a favor, and delaying or withholding foreign aid as an incentive to act.

Trump opened himself to the charges. He didn’t have to, but he did. The recklessness and bravado are just part of his make-up, but they are qualities which can lead to bad outcomes, just as they very much have in almost all of America’s foreign relations. The divisions created there among both traditional friends and opponents and the coercive tactics used are just part of what is dividing America.

Given the entire context of an American-induced coup overthrowing an elected government in Ukraine (and remember, no American politician of either party admits to that) – just as Trump has done in Bolivia and attempted in Venezuela – Trump’s phone call may seem small, but I don’t think anyone can defend it.

 John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ANDRE VLTCHEK IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“I Never Saw a World So Fragmented!”

 “Still, they looked, but their brains were not capable of processing what they were being shown. Images and words; these people were conditioned not to comprehend certain types of information [said of some Hong Kong protesters to whom the author spoke, trying to explain to them some of the realities of events going on in other countries].”

https://www.unz.com/avltchek/i-never-saw-a-world-so-fragmented/

 

Fragmentation?

Well, we have several huge, dedicated, extremely well-financed organizations committed to keeping it so.

The State Department, CIA, the Pentagon, and America’s corporate press. They are assisted mightily by their “sister” organizations in American-dominated parts of Europe and Asia.

History does tend to support the view that when fragmented forces of any kind – in war, in politics, in business – are engaged against large, well-organized opposition, they lose.

Many old sayings, such as “Divide and conquer,” have this truth embedded in them. So, the servants and willing helpers of American dominance work hard to keep things fragmented.

I see little opportunity for change in the situation beyond the gradual, inexorable change now underway in the world, the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world, the result of many new competitors arising and the realigning of interests of many older ones in the face of new opportunities and challenges.

Also, there is the rise of new centers of opposition, notably China and Russia. New centers of leadership. Even new technologies play a role in this great transition in world affairs.

America’s own establishment is now unthinkingly contributing to increase the rate of change through its heavy-handed reactions to the emerging order.

Sanctions, tariffs, threats, ultimatums are not the stuff of which to build a brave new world. They confront and attempt to demolish the genuine interests of many others, something that is simply not possible over the long term.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Russia’s 110-Ton Tu-160 Bomber Outran Japan’s F-35s

“The F-35 has a maximum speed of just 1.4 Mach and can’t use it’s afterburners for more than a minute or it starts to melt”

 

https://www.checkpointasia.net/russias-110-ton-tu-160-bomber-outran-japans-f-35s/

 

Very interesting anecdote.

I think the many unpleasant aspects of the F-35 almost come to symbolize America’s sad declining state.

All outer gloss, disguising what’s really inside, which is, not much.

Aggressively pushed onto others, every poor ally America having been pressured to buy it to help subsidize its frightening cost.

Unable really to do some of its basic job.

In fact, its basic job never really carefully defined. Is it a fighter-bomber or a fighter-interceptor or still something else?

Of course, when you try being everything, you frequently end up being nothing.

Non-competitive, both in cost and performance.

Extremely costly. Suitable only for a power that can literally print money to pay the bills.

The parallels are striking.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARKO MARJANOVIC IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Donald J. Trump’s Brilliant, Hilarious Rebuke of the War Party”

 

“Trump is a lazy, demented degenerate.”

Indeed.

He’s almost unbelievable. You have to rub your eyes watching him.

An American original grotesque. Like something strange escaped from a zoo. Or Victor Frankenstein’s creature lurching around.

But, despite his ghastly nature, getting out of Syria was a good thing, although he did it very badly, costing many lives.

I actually did not think it would happen. After all, it very much goes against Israel’s wishes.

I think the key considerations for Trump were that he felt he had done enough for Israel’s desires in other matters that he could afford to oppose them here, and, the really important thing for this ultimate narcissist, that he was convinced he needed a “withdrawal” somewhere to get re-elected.

And, I’m inclined to think him right in that. Biden or Warren running against him is just the same old, same old, undeviating support for Pentagon and Empire. He won’t have done much, but his opponent will have done nothing.

Of course, this for that other segment that supported him in 2016, not the base wearing red MAGA caps on shopping trips to Walmart, the folks who love walls and hate anyone kneeling near Old Glory or speaking Spanish.

His opponent will say he did Putin’s work for him, but I don’t think that charge carries any weight with those opposed to America’s insane wars.

He has created an extraordinary political situation.

Readers might like:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/10/15/john-chuckman-comment-trump-and-northeastern-syria-withdrawal-turkeys-invasion-putins-success-notes-on-saudi-arabias-crown-possibly-endangered-prince-irans-new-pride-in-its-capabiliti/

 

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Is the U.S. in a constitutional crisis? Depends who you ask

“The current standoff is a stress test for American democracy, scholars say, unlike anything in history”

 

We have something similar in Britain, a country without a written Constitution, its “constitution” said to be the body of traditional practices and laws and court decisions.

There is a battle between Boris Johnson and Parliament over the required steps and procedures for BREXIT. He has even been accused of lying to the Queen in order to get Parliament adjourned temporarily.

Johnson resembles Trump in many personal characteristics and is perfectly ready to ignore traditions and rules and to skirt laws. I’ve called him Trump with an Eton accent.

Both situations, Britain and the US, mainly result from the fact of extremely driven, rude and narcissistic men having taken office. Men convinced they are right and ready to defy anyone saying they are not. Johnson, of course, hasn’t even been elected by anyone beyond his own Conservative Party’s convention, a rather odd aspect of Britain’s “democratic” political system that a man in that position can drive the nation hard on a very contentious and consequential issue.

What I think we see is the weakness of organized institutions in the face of such men. Institutions like legislative bodies or a founding document like the American Constitution. Look at Trump’s international record. He’s torn up important working international treaties, ignored the UN and ICC, arbitrarily hits nations with sanctions – which are, strictly speaking, American laws for Americans, having no legitimate application to other nations – and tariffs. He’s created chaos in half a dozen places.

Trump is the very kind of man that written constitutions are expected to be able to limit or stop, but I think the expectation is wrong. He will only be controlled by the country’s civil law in avoiding the clearest criminal acts such as killing and extortion.

As far as his personal history goes, he has always skirted rules and laws in his business and private life, but that’s part of what makes him so attractive to his base supporters. America is, and always has been, a nation with a great many scofflaws. Some of the wealthy signers of the Declaration of Independence were little more than smugglers, some were in the business of stealing native lands, and many were slaveholders, which was at the time not against the law strictly but was nevertheless regarded by the world’s thinkers and writers as against the spirit of the law.

Of course, in the sense most people think about elections, Trump, just like Boris Johnson, wasn’t even elected. He is one of a number of minority American Presidents owing to the Constitution’s Electoral College provision.

In a sense, I think Trump is going to demonstrate how inadequate the American Constitution really is, and we know already that it has many inadequacies and weak points, including the Electoral College. Then there’s the immense difficulty of changing the Constitution even slightly. There are many long-simmering arguments about the Constitution and taxes and conscription and gun ownership and going to war.

And, of course, slavery as an institution was, in an indirect fashion, written right into the American Constitution, a fact which I think should give anyone pause who regards that document and its authors as extraordinary. The very fact that slavery was included in a covert fashion is perhaps evidence that the Founders recognized already that it was a shameful institution.

My statement about the Electoral College, of course, is based on the assumption that all elections should be decided by democratic majorities, something which most people today take for granted as a basic principle. But that was not the view of America’s Founding Fathers, many of whom regarded the word “democracy” much the way “communism” was regarded in 20^th century America. That’s why the hybrid thing they created is called The Republic, and loyal Trump supporters are the very people who want it to stay that way.

Americans have long fooled themselves about the Constitution being so perfect, but it’s not, not at all. And I think in the end, no document or tradition or institution can effectively control the kind of man with a true tyrant’s temperament and impulses, once he has managed to creep through the cracks into a position of power. Hitler destroyed the in-many-ways admirable Weimar Republic. Stalin ignored the Soviet Constitution, many of whose provisions were quite advanced and generous-sounding.

_____________________

Response to a comment saying, “One day the only thing people will remember about Trump was he was a most repulsive man”

True for many, but his loyalists will always say otherwise. I’m afraid that kind of division of opinion is just part of the human condition.

Remember, there were Russians, millions of them, who genuinely shed tears when Stalin’s death was announced.

_____________________

Response to a comment:

The United States never has been a democracy, although ordinary people and popular media do use the term. For the most part, at an official level, it doesn’t even claim to be one.

It’s always been formally called a republic, a rather nebulous term covering a huge variety of past societies, none of them very democratic and some not at all, like ancient Rome.

America’s Founders, many of them, did not trust the idea of democracy, fearing it had the potential through majority voting to siphon off the wealth of the kind of men who wrote the Constitution.

The contemporary global-empire version of America has only become worse in that regard.

Money totally dominates both national elections and the workings of foreign policy.

The wealthy give the money for the elections – the United States spending literally billions every national election – and they get a return on investment through policies and government activities. Their huge sums of campaign money also effectively form a barrier to entry against candidates not coming from the two official parties. If you don’t have a very fat wallet, you haven’t a chance of being elected.

I’ve explained how it all works here:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK COCKBURN IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“The Saudi Crown Prince plans to make us forget about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi before the US election

“A further difficulty the crown prince will face in trying to reboot his nation’s image is that the Khashoggi affair has energised a wave of criticism from former friends, including Republican senator Marco Rubio”

 

What better symbolizes the utter corruption of Washington than its continued close ties with that grotesquely brutal murderer, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia?

Yes, Trump is especially guilty, but he is only a rude chief representative for the entire Washington establishment.

Rather than drain “the swamp,” he ended up giving jobs to many of its inhabitants. On major matters, he and they are pretty much indistinguishable.

Except for his frequent incoherence, he represents nothing really different compared to all the rest of “the best government money can buy.”

Of course, there is the Israeli connection. Netanyahu and the Crown Prince have a mutual admiration society. They are covert allies in many projects, all of them involving blood and death. Kind of “blood brothers,” you might say.

Sadly, Trump and much of Washington dance to Netanyahu’s tune for the Middle East. We have the ongoing spectacle of a great power dictated to by what is effectively one of its own colonies, albeit a rather special one in the immense attention and subsidy it receives.

The virulent hatred and unwarranted attacks we see against Iran, efforts to strangle a major economy of more than eighty million people and hurling ugly threats of war – Trump recently, like Hillary Clinton a few years ago, having actually threatened Iran with the word “obliteration” – are the direct products of that sick and inappropriate relationship.

Netanyahu, with his putrid “moral army” lined up regularly behind a fence to shoot unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, including women and children, is absolutely no different in character than the murderer Saudi Crown Prince. The screams of Netanyahu’s victims are indistinguishable from the screams the Crown Prince’s victims.

Hypocrisy is just thick in the air when Washington here or there accuses some government whom it doesn’t like of brutality or terror. We hear the words regularly, but the people voicing the charges themselves have blood up to their armpits.

Washington both tolerates and exploits genuine terror for its goals and desires, day-in and day-out.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ANDREW BUNSCOMBE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Why has America taken so long to confront its dark history?

“Efforts to force debate on the legacy of slavery come at fraught time for nation under Donald Trump”

 

Pretty much empty blather, something not uncommon from this writer.

Does anyone really think that the establishment of the American empire is going to pry up the paving stones in Washington to reveal all the maggots squirming underneath?

America was built on some terrible, terrible practices, slavery being just one of them.

This is a country, we can see right now, abusing and threatening and killing people in a dozen different lands.

The activity is right before our eyes, yet Washington pretends it’s all otherwise than it is.

The horrors of Syria are owing to its own government, so just ignore all those paid cutthroat mercenaries carrying American weapons.

Starving millions of people in Venezuela is supporting democracy. Orwell couldn’t have said it better.

Israeli soldiers kneeling behind a fence and shooting unarmed demonstrators is “restraint.”

To understand better, see:

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/08/02/john-chuckman-comment-reference-to-americas-current-inability-to-have-intelligent-political-discussion-in-fact-it-is-an-illusion-to-think-things-were-ever-much-different-highlights-of-an-extrem/

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARJORIE COHN IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“As Afghan Carnage Continues, US Presidential Candidates Face Key Question

“Democratic contenders should commit to immediate troop withdrawal and to cooperate with international investigations of U.S. war crimes”

 

I honestly do not believe that Americans generally give a damn that their government is slaughtering people, anywhere.

They’ve been at the business since WWII in many meaningless imperial wars and interventions.

Killing is what Washington does. I think it fair to say it has become a major national industry.

A couple of generations of Americans have grown up with that as their formative environment, many making careers around it with military service or employment in the defense industry or careers in various government agencies such as the State Department.

And I have to say that the fairly prevalent xenophobia and blind patriot religious belief in the country just reinforce the perception of indifference and brutality.

I have never seen sorrow or regret or concern over about three million Vietnamese killed, and killed horribly by napalm, cluster bombs, and carpet bombing, plus having had their country left strewn with landmines and tons of poisonous Agent Orange.

And it seems to me, most Americans do just sit back and watch a good deal of that horror repeated on poor souls in the Middle East. America’s reasons and methods have been different there, but the results, in terms of death and destruction, have pretty well been the same. The Neocon Wars have killed at least two million people and created many millions of desperate refugees.

America’s brutal wars abroad breed brutality on the home front too.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Trump Will Not Accomplish Anything Unless the Republican Party Is Destroyed

“Trumpism is not the problem, establishment conservatism is”

 

“Trump Will Not Accomplish Anything…”

For an accurate headline, you should have stopped right there.

Looking for excuses, such as the old-line Republican Party standing in Trump’s way, suggests that the author simply has not studied his subject.

Trump has proved himself a loudmouth who gets little done, loud and uncouth, uncouth because he calls everyone names, setting shabby standards for diplomacy and politics and ordinary civility.

And it’s his cowardice that has put the foreign policy of the United States into the hands of truly vicious men. He was so frightened of losing his office – in fact, something that was always an extremely remote possibility, for, as we saw in the Clinton case, impeachment is an arduous, resource-eating matter, and it is undertaken only with great reluctance – that he horse-traded for some security, and part of the price he paid was appointing vicious men unfit to hold their posts – Bolton, Pompeo, and Abrams.

He is genuinely ignorant about many important matters, but what else would you expect from someone who never, literally never, reads anything? Or ever listens to anyone, even the best experts?

He has started a major trade war with China, and he hasn’t the least idea what he is doing. He’s an illiterate in economics.

Only the other day, his public words ignored basic economic truth. He does not understand that it is the citizens of the country imposing tariffs who mainly end up paying them in the increased cost of goods.

Everything in Walmart and Costco and in every general store is going to cost more, hitting his political base hard in their pocketbooks.

And earlier, when he talked about winning trade wars and how trade wars were good things, he resembled Groucho Marx giving a lecture in economics.

His economic “policy” is to “beggar his neighbor,” and that just doesn’t work in the end. Trade is not, as they say, a zero-sum game where everything one party loses, the other party gains, and vice-versa, but Trump sure thinks that is how it works. It’s the untutored thinking of a 14-year old.

And it’s no different in anything else he’s done. Everything he touches becomes blighted.

International affairs? He’s pretty much made a fool of himself on North Korea, blunder after blunder, and in the end, the North is never going to give up all its nuclear weapons, and if they were to give up any, they’d need to receive something handsome in return. Trump offers squat and barks orders, or rather he lets Bolton and Pompeo bark the orders while he takes another stroll in the garden with Kim.

The North Koreans see their nuclear weapons as a matter of survival, and they very much are. That’s a far truer claim for North Korea than it is for Israel, which enjoys support from America’s arsenal, rather than being threatened by it. After all, the United States, during the Korean War, conducted a brutal campaign of three years of carpet-bombing which snuffed-out one-fifth of the country’s entire population, and that’s a Pentagon estimate.

America keeps a sizable, well-equipped army on the North’s border, it runs regular, large-scale, intimidating war games with the South, and it has nuclear weapons within reach at Okinawa, Japan and at Guam. Yet not the least meaningful concession was offered to North Korea in exchange for harshly demanded disarmament. Talk about arrogance and having no idea of what negotiation is?

Withdrawal from Syria? One phone call from Tel Aviv, and the idea was never heard again. And just the fact that Trump so abruptly brought the matter up, without having consulted before opening his mouth, says a great deal about him.

A coup in Venezuela, a place that is none of his business? He set a Keystone Cops example of how to do it. It would be hilarious, if it weren’t for all the Venezuelans he’s making miserable with extreme sanctions and dirty tricks like turning off their electricity.

The Wall, his red-meat offering to his political base? He hasn’t achieved anything. And Mexico was going to pay for it? The man makes very lame jokes.

Tear-up a perfectly good international treaty with Iran, a country every expert and major leader said was scrupulously following the terms? Impose harsh new sanctions on Iran for having done absolutely nothing?

And, by the way, just as in the case of Venezuela, sanctions hurt ordinary people, never leaders and elites. That’s just the way they work, always, but Trump doesn’t understand how they work any more than he understands how tariffs work.

Send in the Navy and Air Force to threaten Iran still further with war?

None of it makes an ounce of sense. He’s only doing these things because Netanyahu wants them done. So, America carries on before the entire world like an asylum full of madmen because one shabby Israeli politician, who just happens regularly to kill and steal, says it should?

There is absolutely not one genuine American national interest involved in this entire dumb show. But there sure are Trump interests, as in his building a huge war chest for the 2020 election, money from various extremely wealthy American partisans of Israel and from America’s numerous Israel Lobbies. Self before country, that’s Trump. Ego before thinking or ethics.

He doggedly served the same special interest again when he gave away what was not his to give, in Syria and in Jerusalem. In doing so, he had America breaking international laws and protocols and treaties.

Oh, he has used a lot of pretty foul language about migrants and refugees and Muslims, setting such a fine example. He likely views his ugly words as some kind of compensation offered to his political base after having failed to get anywhere with their beloved wall.

The man is close to a total failure. And from past tax returns recently obtained and analyzed by The New York Times, failure has long been a major activity for Trump. Years of being deeply in debt.

Just like lying, something he does constantly, right down to petty matters like his score when he plays golf, something recently reported by several sources who should know.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN MONDOWEISS

 

“The US mainstream media is ignoring the Israel-Saudi Arabia de facto alliance”

 

Yes, and it’s all part of American effort to reshape the entire Middle East, an effort which so far has cost about 2 million lives.

The Crown Prince is regarded as a key part of the future of that effort.

He serves the hyper-aggressive new American drive for empire worldwide.

And, of course, Israel really is a de facto American colony in the Mideast.

Actually, the Saudis and Israelis have always had a lot in common, contrary to popular notions.

Both represent privilege in the region, extreme privilege.

Both represent forms of wealth. The Saudis, oil. The Israelis, American and British dual-citizen investors.

Both want to have a lot of “clout” in the region. That’s the problem with Iran for both of them. Its size – about the population of Germany – and oil wealth make it the “natural” dominant country in the region.

Israel’s problems with Iran have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. That accusation is just another weapon for beating down an unwelcome competitor for influence.

Importantly, both represent outsider interests. The House of Saud only goes back a little while, a decade or so, before re-created Israel. It is not an ancient kingdom, although they like to create that impression.

Israel was re-created and is run by Ashkenazim, a group of Germanic origin whose native language is Yiddish, a derivative of German. The word Ashkenazi means “German.” Nothing Middle Eastern about it, except a sentimental attachment to the land of the Bible for believers, but belief gives you no legitimate real estate claims. If it did, the world would be an even bigger mess than it is.

After 9/11, the Saudis were desperately looking for ways to improve their standing in Washington’s eyes.

They did not “do” 9/11 but there were lots of shady matters that made them look bad. Payments to Osama intended only to keep him out of Saudi Arabia. Saudi citizens in the hijack crowd.

After all, from almost any point of view, America’s invading Saudi Arabia, even though they weren’t guilty, would have made immensely more sense than the pointless invasion of Afghanistan. So, the Saudis felt keenly the need to please.

Cozying up to Israel was one of their main methods of attacking the problem. They’ve been working on it now for years. The tone of all press and publicity coming out of Saudi Arabia is unrecognizable from, say, 15 years ago.

And the Crown “usurper” Prince takes things even further, just what Washington wants.

Washington loves men with highly flexible morals and principles. They are useful to the cause of empire. A version of Hitler’s willing helpers, if you will.

The Saudis won creds for covertly supporting the slaughter in Syria, a pet project of Israel’s.

Bombing the crap out of Yemen gave them some gold stars too.

As did their internal assaults on a small Shia minority, Shia Islam being identified with some of Israel’s most hated states.

The Khashoggi Affair is an embarrassment, but they’re doing their best to work around it.

The extra couple of days Pompeo gave them for a “thorough” investigation is for them to get their story straight and decide on the fall guys.

Interestingly, Turkey keeps revealing grisly details to pressure for things they want. They do know exactly what happened.

 

Here is some additional information on the Saudi-Israeli alliance:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/10/19/john-chuckman-comment-is-something-big-about-to-break-in-saudi-arabia-we-have-the-most-fascinating-bit-of-dirty-work-in-years-revealing-flat-footed-lies-and-hypocrisy-from-the-united-states-it/

Readers may enjoy:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/john-chuckman-comment-here-is-what-the-turks-know-about-the-khashoggi-murder-there-really-cannot-be-a-doubt-that-this-was-planned-to-happen-exactly-as-it-did-and-no-doubt-authority-came-from-the-to/

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CHRIS HEDGES IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom”

“The persecution of Assange is part of a broad assault against anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist news organizations.”

 

Wow, what an excellent piece of analysis.

I wouldn’t subtract or change a word.

I might add a point or two.

Chris Hedges includes the rot of money in American politics, but there is a lot more to be said about what is at the very heart of things.

The extent of it is not well understood by the average American and certainly not understood by observers abroad.

America has basically managed to create an elaborate political system with all the showy external trappings of democracy but almost none of its content.

America today is run by a relatively small number of people who control the levers in both parties because they control the money available, truckloads of it. These people are served by the American empire’s security-military apparatus and the politicians in Washington who are beholden to them.

The whole gang together, what I tend to call America’s power establishment, has an almost closed system serving themselves. That is why nothing beneficial or useful or even decent can get done in America anymore. And, of course, they do not like those who, like Assange, bring any light to the dark realities of American government.

The unquestioned power of that money-drenched American establishment is why there is now a continuous stream of wars which are not in the average American’s interest at all but are buried under thick layers, almost like stage make-up, of rhetoric about Patriotism and defending freedom.

There are almost no useful or effective rules governing the use of money in American politics. There are also no useful or effective rules governing the operations of America’s immensely powerful special-interest lobbies.

So, if I were a motivated young politician with some good ideas and intentions, I would virtually never stand a chance against the establishment candidate whose millions buy television ads, enable him to travel everywhere with elaborate support, and have the services of everything from a make-up man to pollsters and public relations flacks.

Of course, accidents do happen, and, once in a thousand times, a little guy does manage to win owing to some peculiar local set of circumstances, an event which will be jumped on by the establishment press as showing that things still work for the little guy in America. But such events are almost meaningless because their numbers are necessarily so small. They do not characterize the system because they cannot.

An individual little hero here or there, as a Bernie Sanders, means nothing in the big picture. Its just like a nice little bookstore trying to compete with Amazon or a local specialty soft drink maker trying to compete with Coca-Cola.

They can have their tiny local business, but they cannot dream of seriously competing with the monster corporation. And the truth is often that the monster corporation can put them out of business at any time it decides to do so, or it can buy them out, but it is usually not worth the effort.

Many people do not understand that marketing products has become a monstrous effort which includes everything from research and nonstop advertising to literally buying the shelf space for products from the local grocery store chains. You, as a small producer of anything, can often barely get space on the store shelves, will certainly not be able to get the favorable paid-for space at eye-level and easy-reach, and may indeed in some cases be closed out completely from getting space. That’s just part of the way corporate marketing works.

America has taken these proven practices from corporate business and applied them to politics. Every step in a modern political election campaign reflects the same kinds of efforts as Coca-Cola or Frito-Lay pushing their products, and it all costs a great deal of money. You need money just to recover from money spent on a tactic that proves not to work. And money itself acts as what economists call “a barrier to entry” against potential competitors. You are, in effect, not even allowed to play cards at the table without a very large stake.

The only way to stop this behavior in politics, so that candidates could have a fairer opportunity to talk about their actual ideas and views, would be to choke off the money, but no one with power is willing to do that because everyone of them benefits from the way things are run.

Note also that money not only closes off honest campaigning and exchange of ideas, it serves to discourage from running those who have sincerely-held independent views and a desire for changing something that is wrong. This way of doing things is responsible for pre-packaged candidates and lists of campaign phrases out of manuals. In those senses, too, it is closed system.

But the people putting up the large amounts of political campaign money – literally billions in every major American election – want things to be exactly that way. They don’t want surprises or significant change. They want what they want and what they pay for. It is easy to see the tendency for government to become plutocracy, no matter what nice words are written on pieces of parchment kept in museums.

When a country has become an international imperial force, such as the United States very much has, it is just not the money people who want things to remain as they are. It is the powerful groups running massive agencies like the Pentagon and CIA. They, too, spend vast amounts of money, most of it serving the interests of those same money people, and they do not want change.

Great bureaucracies always have a tendency to protect and perpetuate themselves. The values and intentions of huge forces like the Pentagon and CIA are not friendly to democratic principles, no matter what their charters may say. They are intrinsically authoritarian organizations, and the more they grow and influence a society, the less it becomes a free place, again no matter what the old words on parchment say.

They are, of course, the natural allies of the money people. They serve them abroad in the workings of empire and have a common interest in minimizing political change at home. It is easy to see why ordinary citizens come to feel politics is useless and unresponsive to them. It is.

Whether you vote for Democrats or Republicans, you get the Pentagon, the CIA, the money people, and a ruthless empire abroad, with just some differences in rhetoric. Here again the system operates much like great corporations with their promotional and marketing wars for McDonald’s or Burger King, Coke or Pepsi. Huge amounts of money are spent, and the result is a choice between products similar in most essential respects. Both corporations prosper and their vast walls of spending make it mighty hard for any new competitors to enter against them. That is pretty much what American politics is reduced to.

And this way of operating applies not only to political campaigns in America but to matters like major foreign policy. Take the example of the bizarre relationship America has with Israel, a country with a population the size of Ecuador’s. It is a relationship which causes great amounts of war and trouble in the world and truly works against the long-term interests of ordinary Americans, to say nothing of its spurning of all ethical principles.

The relationship is based on the same money-drenched methods which govern American politics. Israel, despite its insignificant size and greatly troubling behavior, is able to stay right at the forefront of things, to be on every politician’s lips, to be constantly mentioned (favorably) in the press, and to heavily influence American foreign policy through exactly the same mechanisms.

Some of its demands today are even going beyond foreign policy and into the internal affairs of the United States, as with the constant advocacy for laws making support for peaceful boycotts to influence Israel’s awful behavior illegal or the advocacy for laws in every state equating criticism of a powerful state actor like Israel with hate-speech. Just nasty, self-serving nonsense, but it goes on day after day with little attention paid.

Well, Washington’s establishment today just goes on and on about supposed Russian influence in America. It is unproved stuff serving powerful imperial establishment interests, but, even were there some bit of truth in the accusations, the underlying reality of Russian influence in America is a bad joke. Russia cannot even get a good word in the press and is treated unfairly in countless serious matters.

When I saw the silly Facebook stuff, about so many insignificant ads having been bought during the election by a few people in Russia, offered as evidence of influence, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Out of countless billions of dollars in advertising and advocacy on Facebook, the claim represented national concern about someone spitting into an ocean.

But here is Israel and its domestic advocates waging a vast and ongoing campaign to influence a great many matters inside America – from freedom of speech and peaceful protest action to foreign affairs and every national political campaign held – and we hear no complaints or concerns at all. And Israel’s influence in foreign affairs has been deadly, tumbling America into pointless wars time and again.

And it is doing so again, right now. Only recently, we have a recording leaked in Israel of Netanyahu bragging about how he is personally responsible for Trump’s destroying the Iran Nuclear Accord, an act opposed by every expert and most countries on earth, and an act causing dangerous tensions and threats of instability and hostilities.

Israel doesn’t have to worry because it is protected. But what about everyone else? The results of deliberately destroying a peaceful, smoothly-working international accord could be truly catastrophic.

A small country is able to leverage the United States in this unacceptable and dangerous way, against the wishes of almost every statesman and expert in the world, precisely because of the way America runs its national politics. Trump is looking to assure the success of his 2020 campaign, and everyone else on the planet is taxed with fear and threats so that he can feel secure politically. I think nothing better demonstrates the insanity of America’s laws about money in politics.

But we keep getting the silly distraction of what a threat to American democracy Russia is, simply an idiotic and unsupported idea. Meanwhile, Israel’s direct meddling in American politics threatens to bring an economic and military calamity down on our heads, and you will not find a word of criticism from politicians or the press.

Israel’s lobby in the United States is one of the best organized, best financed, and feared in existence. If you go along with it, you benefit with campaign money and good press and perhaps assistance from various experts and professionals. If you oppose it, those same resources will be applied to working against you and making you look bad in one way or another. It undoubtedly has information systems for tracking all political activities and attitudes that would be the envy of many large corporations.

It is easy to see that if the rules governing lobbies and campaign donations were changed, this would all come screeching to a halt. American policy in the Mideast could reflect fairness and decency and even most of America’s long-term interests. Wars and threats and terrible things like millions of desperate refugees created by those same wars would disappear.

But you will not see it changing any time soon in a country whose hideous Supreme Court – each member appointed by politicians benefiting from things just as they are – has ruled that money is “free speech,” just as it once ruled in favor of the rules governing slavery. No one with power in Washington wants change, just as the various estates (the great lords and churchmen) of the Ancien Régime in 18^th century France wanted no change affecting their personal situations and privileges. And their unblinking selfishness ultimately brought catastrophe to France.

The model for Israel’s influence in American politics is the model for the general operation of the American government. The same elements are at work in every important matter. And that’s why there is continuous war, massive security and spying systems, gigantic corporations with no limits on their size and influence, and no attention paid to the pitiful rot and poverty so easy to find in a thousand places in America.

Men like Assange – and there are few of them, just as there are always relatively few brave and intelligent people who work to change what is wrong in the world (after all, gifted people can make a whole lot more money by going with the flow of things and working for a corporation) – become effectively “the enemies of the people” under the system. His work shed light on the rot and served as real investigative reporting, while the corporate press just functions as part of the system, defending it, avoiding investigating it, and almost never publishing anything adverse about it.

The corrupt nature of America’s national politics is nicely symbolized by Obama, a man so often regarded (wrongly) as liberal and principled. He came to politics as a second-rate lecturer in constitutional law, the kind of work that earns a moderate middle-class income and maybe a pension. Yet, he just left the presidency as a man worth literally tens of millions of dollars. His new home alone cost more than eight million dollars.

Doing the establishment’s work – which in Obama’s case involved killing hundreds of thousands of people abroad and supporting massive new intrusions into the privacy of Americans – is very rewarding. And that is pretty well the story of every major American politician.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

We have never even heard before of such an animal as a “major non-NATO ally.”

But now that the harridan Hillary has decided to bestow the never-before-heard-of honor, the press, including the Globe, seems to think it’s worth reporting as an event.

Her words are just one more cheap gimmick to keep some American troops in Afghanistan as long as possible.

Perhaps there’ll be some troops there, just as there are in Germany, three-quarters of a century after the war.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Globe’s editorials just get dumber and dumber.

They are beginning to remind me of “new sound” of CBC Radio, uninformed and half-baked.

Assange wants a world without secrets?

First, you have no basis for that assertion, none whatever.

Second, as any informed person understands, there are secrets and then there are secrets.

No one, absolutely no one, wants a world with no secrets.

But the fact seems to have eluded the writer of this intellectual mush that for decades we have been victims of unwarranted official secrets and just plain lies.

So much so that when the Globe or anyone else presents the news, none of us, including the Globe, even knows whether it is genuine news, and if it is genuine news, whether it is predicated upon false antecedents.

How can you have an informed democracy in that kind of environment? You cannot. And America very much does not, and with a man like Harper as leader Canada creeps off slowly in that same direction.

Take any example you like from history since WWII.

The invasion of Iraq was based on lies, began other lies, and to this day most people do not understand why countless billions were spent and upwards of half a million people killed.

The same analysis applies to the foolish crusade in Afghanistan. Only yesterday we had two reports on progress there: an official one, from the president, saying things were going okay, and an intelligence leak saying things weren’t going fine at all. This is absolutely typical of America’s world of imperial secrets today.

One could provide an astounding list of the cost in lives and treasure official lies and secrets have caused.

And people cast ballots for people who tell them no truth, intending to do things the voters would never support if they knew the truth. Broken campaign promises are pretty small change compared to this systematic distortion of democracy.

Ten years of Vietnam, killing about 3 million innocent people and leaving a landscape devastated? All started with a big fat lie, and an endless series of lies saw the horror through.

The genocide of Cambodia with a million or so killed? All started with a big fat lie: the American bombing and mini-invasions destabilized a decent neutral government, handing power off to the likes of Pol Pot.

I am genuinely tired of the kind of smug, self-righteousness of right-wing people like the author of this editorial. They have done nothing for the decades of my life but lead us into mass murder and destruction, time after time after time.

There is no possible effect of leaks like those of WikiLeaks that can be remotely so damaging as the real big-power world of lies, deceptions, and secrets.

We truly are approaching, and I think Americans have virtually reached, a world where your vote does not matter at all because you have no idea what it is you are voting for. The immense excitement over Obama two years ago has all been ground into the dust as he carries on killing and lying just like George Bush.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

There is nothing new in learning anything which confirms that Tom Flanagan is a nasty piece of work.

The man is pure, unadulterated American Right-Wing, a thrust-the-imperial-flag-into-the-chests-of-those-working-against-America’s-sacred-interests man, without a trace of decent traditional conservative.

He literally represents in Canada everything you find in that ugly mob which includes Dick “kill the turbanhead scum” Cheney, Tom “the money launderer” DeLay, Sarah “the idiot witth super-sized glands” Palin, Newt “I divorced my wife dying of cancer” Gingrich, and all the other charming Washington folks who work tirelessly for war and imperial interests. The influence and the money for promoting Right-Wing values come up alongside the same pipelines which carry Alberta’s crude and natural gas South.

I have never understood why the Globe gives him column-inches periodically, other than the well-know fact that he has been adviser to Harper, truly the most divisive politician in living memory and a man who already has succeeded in corroding away like spilled battery acid a great deal of Canada’s past wonderful international reputation.

Flanagan’s columns have never demonstrated anything beyond the academic quality or interest of just another second-rate social scientist. He is in academic terms a truly undistinguished thinker.

But there is nothing second rate or undistinguished about his visceral instincts for plotting against and trying to destroy traditional Canadian values. The man is an instinctive predator, a perfect hunting-mate for Harper.

I note the comment that Flanagan’s comment about killing Assange was made in the form of a joke, but then only rather sick people make such jokes or laugh at them.

Shouldn’t people who say such things be treated as terrorists, or at least as people having made a criminal threat?

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN INTERVIEW WITH HISTORIAN PAUL KENNEDY IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“I think that the U.S. is the only imperial power in history to deny that it has an empire!”

Mike Sumners,

Actually Rome long maintained the fantasy of a republic (S.P.Q.R.) after it had become an empire with an emperor.

There are many parallels with the US.

I believe, contrary to Kennedy, that the immensely powerful US military may well assume effective control there. Indeed, it already has to some degree.

The last election did nothing to change American policies. Obama is pretty much a creature today of the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and establishment interests.

His early stand on Israel-Palestine has disappeared. He has increased the war in Afghanistan. He keeps 50,000 troops plus airfields and a huge intelligence complex in Iraq. And he is killing hundreds of civilians in Pakistan with his drone-killers.

This is precisely the threat of gorilla-sized military to a free society anywhere at anytime: they not only get mired in costly foreign wars, they wear down the freedoms and values of the society that nurtures them.

Please note that today in America, not only does the FBI look into what people read, but every phone call and e-mail is recorded to be scanned by supercomputers. And the Pentagon desires to be able to switch off the Internet.
___________________

Kennedy’s recommendations for America, so far as they go, are spot on: balance budgets, curtail the trade deficit, and cut back on an overextended military. You might just sum it up as America’s giving up the insane idea that it can do everything at once.

It is most interesting, considering that he is essentially a supporter of American empire.

How interesting, too, that the term empire slips into his references, and those of so many others now: once that would have been taken with bad grace by many Americans.

I did find his book rather dull years ago, greatly padded with a not huge message.

Maybe he is a better talker than writer.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Tough and tireless, yes, but to whose benefit?

“Turn the page” on the coup in Honduras?

When was the last time she or any American Secretary of State talked that way about a coup that the U.S. did not favor?

The Falkland Islands?

They belonged to Britain before Texas belonged to the US.

Before California.

Before Alaska.

And well before the US seized Hawaii against all the natives’ wishes. Their national petition was completely ignored in Washington as the US government annexed the place.

And the people in the Falklands are British in origin and in loyalty.

What you see here is the “special relationship” in action.

Tony Blair spent British lives and wealth on Bush’s pointless crusades, and what does Britain get back?

You might think so elemental a thing as support in the Falklands.

But that’s not how America operates. It takes what it wants from everyone, and blubbers about principles.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHANN HARI IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

Yes, absolutely, the secret prisons in Afghanistan, and those in other places, cast a grim shadow across Obama’s smiling face.

I believe that decisions like keeping America’s torture gulag operating abroad are the greatest source of people’s disappointment with Obama.

But I’m afraid people were being unrealistic to expect much else.

America is an empire, not a dreamy “shining city on a hill,” but a rather brutal society which feels entitled to run the affairs of others in all parts of the planet.

It does this through a combination of its immense economic and military might.

America’s own population lives under a version of Social Darwinism, as relatively few people abroad fully appreciate. There is relatively little sympathy or patience for the concerns of foreigners, a simple but brutal fact.

The American establishment – the intelligence industry, the Pentagon, the defense contractors, and the huge multi-national corporations – do quite literally form a government within a government.

That is not a left-wing fantasy or a slightly paranoid delusion – after all, it was a Republican president and former general, Eisenhower, who first sounded the warning. It is the ineluctable result of this stupendously wealthy and largely unaccountable set of institutions.

A great many dark and devious men hold high positions in this establishment, and they have billions at their disposal plus a general population which is passive in accepting their actions.

Think only of the pointless holocaust in Vietnam. Countless billions wasted, an estimated 3 million Vietnamese murdered in an orgy of killing, and a devaluation of the dollar afterwards to help pay the bill. All of it done for nothing more than the fears and prejudices of that establishment.

The last American President who truly challenged that establishment died on November 22, 1963.

Obama wants to be the elementary civics-class textbook version of a president, the kind of president which the establishment tolerates from either party, not end up being either driven from office in shame or worse.

To talk with genuine expectations about change of any real consequence today in America is utterly naïve. It’s just about as meaningful as talking about change in the France of the late eighteenth century with its dukes and cardinals and princes, whose carriages simply thumped over the bodies of peasants who happened to be in their way.

Yes, a revolution did happen then, but try that in an empire with a military establishment pushing two million, all armed with unbelievably powerful weapons and a set of at least fourteen intelligence services which spy on every phone call and e-mail and even check the books you read at the library.

The French Revolution will never be repeated, and the pathetic American libertarians who naively believe that holding on to their beloved rifles and pistols secures their freedom surely only bring a quiet chuckle from those who know better.