John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“The Charms of Elizabeth Warren”

 

https://russia-insider.com/en/charms-elizabeth-warren/ri27751

 

There are some good, sharp observations here. She’s a weak choice for many reasons.

Of course, the Dark State may actually find her a reasonable alternative to Joe Biden, who is undoubtedly their favorite, representing, as he does, a new version of brainless George Bush, someone who happily served as a figurehead president, smiling and signing every piece of paper shoved in front of him.

And it’s good to have an alternative. Biden is making a spectacle of himself with obviously blundering and forgetful statements on any number of matters, perhaps throwing away the lead he had.

Warren is an excellent Dark State alternative choice.

She has never represented opposition to the Pentagon and CIA and NSA. Never.

She has never opposed imperial wars and coups and interventions.

She has supported dutifully the Defense Department’s budgets.

She holds the attraction of a kind of American wholesome, harmless American professional woman, well-coiffed and well-dressed. The contemporary feminist political equivalent to one of those moms in 1950s’ television series, such as Harriet Nelson in “Ozzie and Harriet,” although Harriet had a kind of smoky undertone, as an old big band singer, missing completely from Warren.

Perhaps, June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley), doing the vacuuming wearing pearls in “Leave It to Beaver” is closer to the mark? June, having gone back to school and earned some degrees?

Despite her effort to appear as something of a human rights champion at home, she has not brought that much-unwanted perspective to foreign affairs. Not to attacks on Syria. Not to attacks on Venezuela. Not to attacks on Iran. Not to Israel’s attacks on everyone. She definitely gets passing grades from the establishment there.

It’s okay at home to blather on about such matters, just as it’s okay to blather about social programs. With their spending a trillion dollars a year – and all of it borrowed – the military-security establishment knows there is no chance for such words to go beyond speeches.

If the speeches make Americans feel good about the state of things, well, that’s just fine.

_____________________

Response to another comment:

Sanders always sounds good, but it’s an illusion to believe the sounds mean anything of substance.

First, he showed the world what kind of stuff he is made of in 2016, when he smilingly supported the woman who cheated him out of the nomination and who, indeed, represented the embodiment of many of the things that his strong campaign condemned.

How is someone like that supposed to stand up to a crowd of guys in big Armani suits and gleaming uniforms seated around huge oak tables in Washington?

His “programs,” like those of Warren or anyone else, are just blather, political entertainment at best. Maybe “fantasies” or “dreams” would be a better word. You are, after all, still allowed to dream or fantasize in America. What you are not allowed to do is to change much of anything.

So long as the Pentagon and the security establishment burn through a trillion dollars a year – money, they don’t even have, but just keep borrowing, putting immense future burdens on average Americans – no “program” of any description will see the light of day.

Furthermore, the American privileged class will not tolerate appropriately-serious new taxes. And just who is it that you think pays all the campaign expenses for “the best Congress money can buy”?

Bernie is an attractive candidate, at a glance, but with a little thought you realize he’s from Cloud-cuckoo-land. He actually doesn’t grasp the hard realities of the country in which he lives.

Vermont is a nice place – I’ve been there several times – pretty, charming, populated with a good many liberal college professor or artistic types, but it is completely out of step with America, the raw, unvarnished reality of a brutal global power representing the interests of a plutocracy.

Vermont – with its roughly one-third of one percent of the national population, unrepresentative economy and ethnic make-up – does a little remind me of Newt Gingrich’s unpleasant phrase about “a sandbox for yuppies,” his characterization of national public television.

The state does represent a kind of prettified Disneyworld attraction, “Precious Early Rural America Land.” Or a rural retreat for Americans fed up with the ugly realities of their own country, both at home and abroad. That’s certainly why Bernie himself went there, fleeing New York decades ago as part of America’s massive urban phenomenon known as “White Flight.”

I suspect the Pentagon and security establishments have no real problem with him making his speeches that are virtually guaranteed to have no effect.

He is not John Kennedy, someone who became a genuine threat to establishment arrangements of his time, arrangements which have only flourished and become deeply rooted for nearly sixty years.

Again, the overwhelmingly dominant reality of America, something affecting and distorting every aspect of its society, is that it represents a plutocracy and runs a brutal global empire for that plutocracy’s benefit.

If you don’t deal with that central fact, then you can deal with almost nothing but matters about as important as re-arranging the dinner table.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SAM HUSSEINI IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Film ‘Official Secrets’ is the Tip of a Mammoth Iceberg

“A new film depicting the whistleblower Katherine Gun, who tried to stop the Iraq invasion, is largely accurate, but the story is not over”.

 

Good gripping tale.

As we can see from so very many modern instances, it matters not at all that truth is on your side, if what you are doing is attacking those with money and power.

And there’s an entire American establishment dedicated to keeping things just that way.

America’s public history of the last half century, at least so far as foreign relations and control of an empire are concerned, is almost entirely an artificial construct.

Absolutely no truth in everything from John Kennedy’s assassination, which was intimately connected with America’s schemes in Cuba, and the despicable Vietnam War to 9/11 and the despicable Neocon Wars in the Middle East which promptly followed.

From hundreds of millions of printed newspapers and television broadcasts to speeches from prominent American politicians, you have a gigantic fabric of lies not unlike that that was constantly being woven and altered by Oceania’s Inner Party in 1984.

That’s not even the slightest exaggeration, but, truly, are Americans in general the least concerned or bothered?

We have no evidence of significant concern. None.

The Democratic Party just weeded out of its debates for leadership the only candidate whom it had brave and informed enough to speak to truth in some of these matters, Tulsi Gabbard.

The ten left just represent varying degrees of hopelessness. On and on with describing dreams about this or that creative social program while the resources and close official attention dedicated to destruction in a dozen lands make all the dreams impossible.

At the same time, there is an almost complete lack of knowledge, and the courage to find out, about what America has been actually doing in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Israel, and in such massively important countries as China, Russia, and Iran.

Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are brave contemporary examples of the American establishment’s methods for shutting down truth and punishing severely those who reveal it. While they have followers and supporters, I am always amazed at how relatively small their numbers are.

And we have remarkably few individuals like Manning or Assange themselves, especially when you consider the scale and scope of America’s many dark works which involve huge numbers of workers. Mostly, we see only “willing helpers” carrying on with their sensitive, secretive, well-paid careers in government.

In the Democratic nomination contest, the “star” liberals, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are virtually no different in these absolutely critical matters than a confirmed old puke of a war criminal like Joe Biden, someone who probably deserves recognition as father of Obama’s industrial-scale extrajudicial killing project with drones and Hellfire missiles making thousands of legally-innocent people in a dozen countries just disappear.

Biden has a long record of smarmy deeds and lack of courage and principles. He is, of course, the most likely to get the nomination.

Acts of killing by America’s CIA are no different in principle and in law than those of the old Argentine military junta’s massive efforts at dragging people they disliked off the streets, drugging them, and throwing them out of airplanes over the ocean, something they did to thousands.

Oh, and during that wonderful project in Argentina, there were no objections from the people in America who had detailed knowledge of what was happening, as at the State Department and the CIA. Only silence.

_______________________

Response to a comment expressing concern that America was going to be lost:

Sorry, but, oh please, America is lost, and has been so for a very long time.

Only tremendous, virtually revolutionary influences such as depression or war or the growth of competing states with the loss of the dollar’s privileged status, are going to change what has become reality.

America’s feeble democratic political system is capable of changing almost nothing. After all, it was constructed with just that in mind.