John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP GIRALDI

 

“A Tale of Two Foreign Policies: The Train-Wreck Abroad Is Bipartisan”

_____________________

Response to a comment saying, “I’ll get you a real third party. We only have one anyway. The property party with two right wings. If our people can return their faith to the source of everything good in our lives, then the notion of the two artificially combating parties will disappear. It’s time to send them both home. And end the show in Washington”

Sorry, but that is dreaming in technicolor.

The fact is the US is pretty much a plutocracy now, and the two parties are heavily supported by that plutocracy.

You cannot even sit down at the card table without a huge stake.

It’s what we call in economics, a barrier to entry.

The many quasi-monopolies and duopolies we see in our economy work the same way, as with gigantic advertising budgets a newcomer cannot hope to match.

A few facts on America’s plutocracy.

The Supreme Court decision that “money is free speech.”

Hillary Clinton burned through 1.2 billion dollars in just one campaign for one person.

Mike Bloomberg spent about $900 million on his recent brief effort for the nomination.

In practical terms, there are no limits on political spending and donating.

And there are no real limits on the work of lobbies for private and special interests.

It has become a standing joke that America has “the best Congress money can buy.”

America’s Frankenstein military/security apparatus is not about defense, at all. It is about the maintenance of global empire. It burns through a trillion dollars a year, and it exists to serve America’s plutocracy and its establishment.

The American tax structure has become terribly bent. It is helping to generate huge disparities, the so-called “one percent”, and support plutocracy.

The main difference between the two parties is the Democrats talk about various domestic social measures.

In all other respects, the parties are identical – in support for the Pentagon/security establishment, support for global empire, and support for almost continuous wars and coups, and both depend on plutocracy for a flow of funds. Voters get no choice at all in such matters.

And the irony for the Democrats is that so long as America burns through a trillion dollars a year for supporting empire – money it doesn’t even have, all borrowed – none of the large social programs can possibly happen.

And who do you think ends up paying for all the interest on all that immense borrowing? It sure ain’t the plutocrats that its expenditure served.

America’s political system is pretty much a rigged game. There’s no serious chance of changing it either, although a catastrophe like we’re now headed into could do that. But they are already talking in Washington of suspending habeas corpus and about which Pentagon general might step in.

Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t even allowed to compete because she questions the wars.

Bernie Sanders has been cheated a second time. He really isn’t a socialist, he’s an FDR progressive. But his being cheated twice by elaborate measures is the perfect example of how risk-averse America’s establishment is.

It ain’t a pretty picture, and the reality always gives me a little chuckle when I read of American officials telling others abroad how they should do things.

By the way, that vast expenditure on empire also gets in the way of improving America’s infrastructure – from schools to bridges.

The genuine way to compete with China is not Trump’s noise and threats and tariffs, it is old-fashioned getting down to work and improving your competitiveness, but America’s establishment isn’t the least interested in doing that. It feels entitled to be number one in everything, and so it just demands it. It’s what Putin accurately describes as “a sense of entitlement.”

In the end, it will get America nowhere, except into trouble. The American Dream was the simple result of having been the last industrial power standing after WWII and having invested heavily for the war.

But those conditions and that era are gone, for good. Others have invested and worked hard, and they do many things better than America does.

After all, do we not see throughout our lives the rise and fall of great firms, of great families? It is no different with empire.

America has been declining in relative terms in the world economy for decades. It is just the way things work. You cannot bully your way back, either, like the big bully in the White House thinks you can.

Pursuing that course is almost certainly going lead to war, and I can’t imagine that any sane person wants that, but to call some leaders in Washington sane is seriously stretching truth.

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

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DANIEL LARRISON IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

‘Trump with a Plan to Divorce Syria’s Kurds but Not Her Oil

‘Trump: “I don’t want to leave troops” in Syria except to “secure the oil”’

 

https://www.checkpointasia.net/trump-with-a-plan-to-divorce-syrias-kurds-but-not-her-oil/

 

This is not really about oil.

The notion of leaving two hundred American special forces in Syria and perhaps interfering with Syria’s access to its own oil represents a hastily, and badly, conceived scheme to placate Netanyahu and the Israel lobby in the United States for the de facto loss of a long and costly proxy war.

Trump essentially has no foreign policy, policy implying a well-thought out set of goals and strategies. Trump takes whatever steps he thinks will secure his re-election, even when the next step seems to contradict the previous one. That’s all the Syria withdrawal was ever about.

Indeed, it is what drives all his efforts abroad, efforts which may be characterized as being consistent only in their inconsistency.

He isn’t a sound pragmatist and strong logical thinker like Putin. Although you might regard his bending every situation towards his own re-election as a kind of pragmatism, it really is not.

It is chaotic because it depends on Trump’s own faulty and fickle judgment, and it involves no other, larger considerations at all. He sacrifices basic principles in his various lurches and drives, principles such as always respecting allies and always acting so that the world regards America as consistent, stable, and dependable.

He needed a “withdrawal” to try re-securing the support of that portion of 2016 voters who have been alienated from him, the anti-war voters who do not necessarily agree with any of his other belly-over-the belt attitudes, such as the importance of building a costly, cumbersome wall on America’s southern border or the benefits of starting international trade wars.

His natural political base is simply not quite large enough to elect him. He must draw a bit of additional support from somewhere, and the anti-war crowd represents his best possibility.

The Democrats have made no effort to offer the anti-war constituency anything. The few who have are treated as pariahs by members of their own party in a shabby public name-calling spectacle, and they will be prevented from winning the nomination.

After all, the Democratic Party in 2016 displayed to the world just how willing it is to manipulate democratic contests for a pre-determined end, in that case for the nomination of Hillary Clinton over a firebrand challenger.

Interestingly enough, the Democratic Party’s anti-democratic efforts in 2016 ended by getting Trump elected. Sanders would have defeated him handily at that time. Hillary is not a well-liked or trusted figure and has always been a cheerleader for war. She provided Trump with just the opportunity he needed.

If they prevent a thoughtful, articulate anti-war candidate like Tulsi Gabbard from getting the nomination, which they almost certainly will, they will repeat history. Trump will win. That’s why they are becoming serious about impeaching him. As I’ve explained before, impeachment in America always is a political act. It would only be otherwise if a President were caught committing a serious felony or a treasonous act, both quite unlikely.

The withdrawal from Syria deeply conflicts with Netanyahu’s fervently declared wishes. Trump undoubtedly thought he had done enough for Israel in the form of lavish giveaways and favors that he wouldn’t hear any complaints over his relatively minor Syria withdrawal.

But he was wrong. There has been noise and pressure. Netanyahu’s capacity to ask for more of almost anything is virtually limitless.

America’s entire set of efforts in Syria – both covert in supporting jihadi-looking mercenaries and overt in occupying certain areas and doing plenty of bombing while pretending to fight ISIS – has had from the beginning nothing directly to do with oil. Syrian oil only came into play as a way to finance some of the terrorist activity and as something valuable of which to deprive Syria’s government.

American efforts have always been about destabilizing or destroying a government that does not toe its foreign policy line, which of course, would involve Syria’s paying homage to Israel, America’s Middle Eastern privileged special-status colony, as the dominant regional power, just as Saudi Arabia, under its usurper Crown Prince, has now effectively done.

Israel has had a tremendous interest in seeing Syria incapacitated because it wanted not only to secure and legitimize its occupation of the Golan Heights, but even perhaps to grab another slice of Syria, a “buffer zone,” in all the chaos of the long proxy war.

Israel has always hated Assad, again for his independent-mindedness, a leadership characteristic which the long series of Neocon Wars, starting with Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, was intended to uproot throughout the Middle East. Or as the worst American imperialists like to put it, in order to make all the killing and destruction sound wholesome, inducing “the birth of a new Middle East.”

So, Israel is working away on Trump to get what it can out of the general defeat in Syria, and that includes any annoyance and irritation that can possibly be achieved in northeastern Syria.

But the notion of a couple of hundred American special forces hanging around to control Syria’s oil for any period of time seems very far-fetched. Maybe it’s a good measure of just how disillusioned and desperate the people who created seven years of terrible war in Syria are.

There’s no way that Putin, after all his immense effort, is going to watch a reunited Syria be reduced by having its natural resources stripped from it. One way or another, this “plan” will fail, even though it may provide difficulties in the meantime.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS ABOUT THE AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY DEBATES

 

“Biden clashes with Warren, Sanders on health care in 3rd Democratic debate

“Candidates pare back some of the bickering that marked 2 earlier debates”

 

Pretty sad field.

The Party killed off the best candidate it had in years, Tulsi Gabbard.

None of these people really challenge the American war machine. Not one. Bernie comes closest, but he has mainly supported it and doesn’t seriously challenge it.

Elizabeth Warren has not only always voted for the hideous budgets, she openly says things like we’ve got to fight our way out of the situations in which we’ve become mired, whatever that stupidity means.

They are all establishment figures of little real promise. Not one of them is stirring or genuinely interesting.

Talk about this or that social program, which is what many of these candidates do, is a waste of breath when you’re spending a trillion dollars a year on the military, security, and spying.

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Response to a comment saying, “The richest country in the world cannot afford healthcare, only more weapons to ‘help’ those who disagree with them”

Well, yes, and just look at the urban and rural hellholes that pockmark the United States.

Genuine Third-World stuff, without even decent drinking water or schools.

That is the reality of America.

Plutocracy and empire and squalor and constant turmoil to serve and expand empire.

The people? Who are you kidding? They simply do not count, except in insincere political speeches.

________________________

Response to a comment saying, “Biden and Obama bombed 6 countries while in office”

Yes, and very importantly, they started the industrial-scale extrajudicial killing program which uses drones and Hellfire missiles to incinerate people legally guilty of nothing. Thousands of them.

And Joe Biden advocated hard to Obama for starting it.

Wonderful people. Doing the same work as Argentina’s old military junta did when it “disappeared” thousands of people it didn’t like.

Only Obama and Biden both smile all the time.

And a lot of people believe their smiles are benign.

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.

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON THE STILL-SWIRLING SCANDALS AROUND AMERICA’S 2016 NATIONAL ELECTION

 

While I am not a political partisan of any party, I believe there can be little doubt that important American agency heads and senior Democratic figures plotted along several lines either to discredit Trump before the election or to deprive him of office after the election.

He was viewed as a political outsider, a maverick, an unwelcome, intrusive figure whose entrance on the national stage might upset a lot of people’s relationships and plans. And it didn’t help that he was a rude and awkward man, given to expressing himself at times in words you might expect to see scratched inside a stall door at a public toilet.

All indications suggest that Obama – the always-smiling but taciturn and secrecy-embracing Obama, his record on whistleblowers and leakers as well as his eight-year record of bombing countless people demonstrating him as being quite ruthless – led this effort, closely allied with Hillary Clinton, the woman, we know from documents, who cheated repeatedly in the Democratic primary campaign to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders.

These are ruthless people, although most of the public is not used to thinking of American political figures in that way. It is a hard thing perhaps for ordinary Americans to absorb the idea that their own country, “sweet land of liberty” as it’s termed in the national theology, is run along lines, not of respect for democracy and rule of law, but of what is sniggered at in Third-world lands.

The totality of the Democrats’ efforts – consulting with discreditable people abroad, paying an ex-spy to create a false dossier on a political candidate, spying on a political campaign, making outrageous public charges, and still other acts – does seriously flirt with subverting democracy and Constitutional government, and that actually approaches the definition of treason.

However, I cannot find myself entirely outraged by the dark series of events because, for me, Trump’s own behaviors are so outrageous and extremely dangerous that they tend to overshadow what the others did. I don’t exonerate them, but we are now faced with terrifying new dangers both to peace and to the health and stability of the world’s economy.

And it is not to be said that the Democrats understood and anticipated such developments and are at least to be partly excused for that reason. No, indeed, they very much contributed to bringing it all on.

The Democrats’ activity reflects the heightened sense of privilege and exceptionalism we now see in so many – indeed in most – of the words and deeds coming from Washington. America’s establishment has comfortably assumed a belief in its being God’s contemporary chosen people, or, in the outrageously self-serving words of Madeline Albright, the “indispensable nation.” Well, considering yourself as indispensable and chosen by God has always had some terrible consequences for those wielding great power. We have the eloquent testimony of Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories to just that effect.

Trump was targeted because he was something of an outsider, someone who hi-jacked, in effect, one of the two old-line political parties, depriving other establishment figures, old-line Republicans like the Bushes or Romneys, of a nomination that “should” have belonged to one of them.

That sense of things does come with something of a threat to the prevailing system of the American power establishment, a system where both parties, no matter what their campaign words, always end by closely supporting the American plutocracy, its empire, and all of the agencies of government concerned with maintaining and extending the empire, especially the Pentagon and the CIA. Even a suggestion that an outsider might represent a threat to that established order was enough to drive a number of insiders to distraction.

Normally, those who challenge the establishment in any fashion are simply allowed to say their piece while being largely ignored by the press and other politicians, having few of their words reach most Americans, as well as suffering the tremendous impact of a campaign-finance drought, those funds always overwhelmingly being gifts from the wealthy. Tulsi Gabbard is the best contemporary example of that approach. There have been others, people with various points of view, from Ralph Nader to Ron Paul.

But a unique set of circumstances in 2016, enabled an “outsider” to get inside under the edge of the big-top tent and assume a position at center ring under the spotlights. The main contributing circumstance, I believe, was the nature of the Democrat’s own candidate, Hillary Clinton, a woman who inspires a great deal of fear and hostility, both outside and inside her own party. But the Democrats were stuck with her because her husband, Bill, has been the key link for years in a supply chain of large campaign-fund donors. No one ignores money in American politics. Had someone else run, most of these events likely would not have happened, and Trump would not now be President.

The new dangers to peace to which I referred can also be at least partly attributed to the work of the Democrats and their senior agency heads. Here is the reason. Trump felt seriously threatened at various points, as we know from reports. One of his ways of dealing with the threat was to approach some powerful and influential people for support and money, people whose primary focus was not the American political establishment but Israel.

The money would provide a war chest for the 2020 election campaign as well as against the threat of a costly impeachment. We’ve only learned recently from an analysis of old tax records that Trump is far less wealthy than anyone had imagined, having been burdened with huge debts for years.

Trump got what he wanted, increasing his sense of security, but the price demanded saw him give away things in the Middle East that were not his to give and begin a seriously threatening campaign against Iran, a country which Israel detests but one which had followed the letter of the law scrupulously in its multi-party nuclear agreement as well as being a country which has started no war in its modern history, despite having had a vicious war launched against it in the 1980s. Its record in wars and strife, despite the rhetoric of Trump or Bolton or Pompeo, compares immensely favorably with those of the United States and Israel.

The new dangers to economic stability are largely Trump’s work, his constant noisy haranguing, his many threats, his arbitrary imposition of large new tariffs, and his creation of an entire new branch of public service, one dedicated to illegally sanctioning people all over the world. I say “illegally” because all of the sanctions represent efforts to enforce American law on other people, ignoring the rule of law in other countries and ignoring virtually all international law and diplomatic protocol.

But while Trump is particularly rude and loud about the way he approaches other countries, the essence of what he tries to do is supported quietly by the American establishment, all of them from both parties. Big matters such as the rise of China and new relationships between Germany and Russia have been establishment concerns for decades. They foreshadow the emergence of a brave new world order, one very much not welcomed by America’s establishment.

The American establishment dreads its relative decline in importance to the world’s economy and its geopolitics. So, they appear, all of them, willing to support, at least for now, Trump’s crude efforts to extract concessions from countries like China by methods which really do reflect traditional mafia methods of gaining footholds in other people’s businesses, with “offers they can’t refuse.”

In the 1950s and 1960s Chicago where I grew up, restaurants and other businesses periodically burnt down for no explained reason. It was widely understood that it was the price of having refused to cooperate with “The Outfit,” to pay the required fees for services such as “protection,” that they offered.

So, we have an extremely complex and devious situation in Washington. Senior members of one major party came close to treason in their opposition to a newcomer. However, at the same time, the newcomer has proved himself so destructive in world affairs, in matters of trade and war, that some might almost be tempted to say that the efforts by Democrats and their senior agency heads were warranted.

But no reasonable person can say that. Rule of law is civilization’s greatest founding principle. Take that away, and you have the rule of the strongest, but it so happens that that is something both parties have long worked towards in America’s foreign affairs. There’s nothing of law or principle involved in any of America’s long string of colonial wars and coups and interventions since the end of WWII. They all involved forcing others to do as they were told. They all involved breaking innumerable laws and conventions and treaties. And they involved a great deal of killing and destruction. Now, that same long-accustomed approach has found a home at the very center of American power in Washington.

We were all treated to the most arrogant display of power and abuse and contempt for law with recent events in Venezuela. It’s never been so plainly on display, almost resembling the free summertime performance of a play in a neighborhood city park, even though it represented immoral and illegal practices America has used many times, perhaps with variations, such as more killing, here or there – in Ukraine, in Cuba, in Chile, in Guatemala, in Iran, in Nicaragua, and in other places. Maybe it is just a reflection of the incompetence of those in charge today that we saw the failed efforts so plainly, but that is just the kind of thing immense and unwarranted arrogance produces, a bizarre belief that if you say something should happen, it must happen.

The center of the American empire is in an unprecedented tangle of downright criminal behavior and fears, on all sides, and represents the greatest possible danger both to the world’s peace and its economic stability. I do not see how it all can end well, even if this or that particular crisis is diffused.

It really does remind one of tales of the last days of Rome, but if you find that an excessive comparison, there’s no escaping the fact that what we are seeing is the close-to-absolute corruption that accompanies close-to-absolute power.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ITEM IN MOON OF ALABAMA

 

“There are freshmen from Michigan and Maryland in Congress who recently made some news with comments about the Zionist lobby. Some anti-imperialists and progressives lauded them for their efforts and defended them against attacks. But these are wolfs in sheep clothing.

“Rep. Ilhan Omar: ‘The people of Syria revolted against Assad’s repressive dictatorship 8 years ago today, demanding a more just and free government. Peace loving people around the world stand in solidarity with them in this struggle!’

“Rashida Tlaib: ‘The anniversary of the uprising against the oppression in Syria was yesterday. We must recognize the struggle of those who organized and stood up against injustice. It is my hope that we can see a Syria that is truly free one day.’”

 

I like Ilhan Omar for speaking out on Palestine, just as I like Tulsi Gabbard’s efforts to understand the ugly war in Syria. I admire them both for public courage.

But, please, this is America we are talking about.

To expect anyone in American politics to come along with completely fresh and informed and honest views is just dreaming.

Just as with Bernie Sanders’ so-called socialism or, indeed, anything at all about Sanders.

He’s a distinguished-looking bag of hot air.

He showed everyone what he was made of in his confrontation with the woman who plainly stole the nomination from him, Hillary Clinton.

He’s never been a strong voice against global empire, against the secret terror of the CIA, against the vast intrusions of the NSA, or against the monstrous waste and mass killing of the Pentagon.

And then we have that thoroughbred phony, Elizabeth Warren, making precious little noises all the time about progressive matters while voting for hateful defense and security budgets and never opposing all those wars and offering us in speeches smatterings of the establishment’s poison about Iran.

I’ve said it many times. There are no liberals, genuine liberals, in the United States, at least not in any positions of authority or influence. Not one in the national government. Not one in charge of a major news source. None guiding the nation’s great institutions and foundations and education establishments.

America is about empire and the wars required to sustain it, and that is pretty much it. The rest is elaborate window dressing, theater, playacting. Empires do not get built and maintained and expanded by nice guys, and the resources constantly pouring into empire leave no room for great human or humane efforts.

Another thing I’ve said many times is that you can have either an empire or a decent country, but you cannot have both. America made its choice, long ago.

The entire atmosphere of the place, the education system, the press, the churches, the politics – all immersed and saturated in war and the drive for empire with little room for other values. It can be seen and heard and felt in a thousand details.

What could be more blatantly unfair and anti-democratic than what we see being done to Venezuela today? Yet, where are the American voices against their government’s open use of threats and terror? The politicians? The editors? The great university heads? The church leaders?

Some might claim an excuse over events in Syria because many facts about responsibility for that set of atrocities remained well hidden for a long time. Many facts remain hidden still, despite our learning a good deal here and there.

But here, in the case of Venezuela, we see daily the blunt face of fascism telling people who they should vote for, who should swear himself in as President, who should control the country’s assets, and destroying the national power grid, an act of terror which undoubtedly killed and injured many and destroyed what was in the fridges of literally millions of the most ordinary people.

Why isn’t anyone shouting at the top of their lungs?

All this done by men who say they respect democracy and human rights and expect to be respected in the world as leaders.

You know, Hitler gave one of the great speeches about peace, not long before he started a new war. It was reported by that great journalist and chronicler of Nazi Germany, William Shirer.

And, under the Nazis, Germany had some window dressings of progressivity, various socialistic measures, if you will. It even sometimes held plebiscites.