As the Trump Administration embarks on a campaign of domestic rendition to silence critics of Israel’s genocide it’s important to acknowledge that the Biden Administration and corporate media lied to us about the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Now that the dirty-little-proxy-war is going south the New York Times, regurgitates a massive expose, The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine, detailing the ongoing betrayal. Basically, the NYT just rewrote the entire Ukraine war story, admitting it was never Ukraine’s war at all. It was Biden’s. The article opens with an admission that the US was actively and heavily involved in equipping Ukraine with weapons, intelligence and plans to attack and kill Russians. Meanwhile, all of our elite political and corporate media lied about it for political reasons and after Harris’s loss in November, the Biden Administration, provided intelligence to Ukraine to allow them to lob ATTACMS and Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia, risking a widening of the conflict. Ultimately, the U.S. military and C.I.A. were allowed to help with strikes into Russia. While the author, Adam Entous, admits that Biden and his team repeatedly crossed lines they had previously refused to penetrate, he fails to explain that Russian successes on the battlefield were the primary reason for Biden’s desperate moves.
For those of us who’ve been paying attention, none of the expose is surprising, although there are numerous details that contribute to the history of the proxy war. Entous, reveals that we were lied to on a continuous basis from the very beginning of the conflict. From Joe Biden down, they all lied about it, even as the risk of a nuclear exchange grew. If you compare this expose to statements made by US leaders and corporate media at the time, you’ll find the lies to be staggering in their implications.
The biggest takeaway for me is the hubris exhibited by the military and CIA officers interviewed for the story. They really believed that NATO tactics and US wonder-weapons would send the Russian Army fleeing in terror. It’s like they never read about the battle of Borodino or studied the Russian defense of Stalingrad at their command schools.
What part about don’t fuck with Russia don’t they get?
Of course, the lies about Ukraine were proceeded by the lies about Russia-gate, galvanizing liberals into a Trump/Putin-derangement-syndrome frenzy . Everything you see is the product of years of anti-Russia propaganda. Hence the years-long obsession with Russian collusion. For liberals, a Democrat president can be as tyrannical and murderous as a Republican but because it’s their team they will ignore it and saunter off to brunch. Of course they don’t really disagree with the bi-partisan warmongering, the Democrats are just the polite, woke face of the bloodthirsty US empire, while the Republicans, and especially Trump, are the empire unmasked.
You will not be surprised that the Times, with their expose, seeks to blame Trump for the forthcoming Ukrainian defeat. Entous writes: “As President Trump seeks rapprochement with Mr. Putin and vows to bring the war to a close. . . . Now, with negotiations beginning, the American president has baselessly blamed the Ukrainians for starting the war, pressured them to forfeit much of their mineral wealth and asked the Ukrainians to agree to a cease-fire without a promise of concrete American security guarantees — a peace with no certainty of continued peace.”
What’s funny is that our elite believed the lies too. Entous’s narrative reflects the beliefs of the Washington establishment. This wrongheaded thinking explains why Trump and his national security team are unable to hear and comprehend what the Russians are saying to them behind closed doors. When you enter negotiations armed with a mountain of false assumptions regarding Russia’s economic and military strength, then the odds that you can secure a meaningful peace deal are slim to none.
If Trump is foolish enough to ramp up military and intelligence support for Ukraine, especially in the wake of the Times article–where a host of US officials confirmed they have planned and helped execute attacks on Russian territory and Russian personnel, he will find himself taking ownership of the debacle. Trump needs a serious adult capable of sitting him down and explaining reality to him, i.e., the US has limited supplies of HIMARS, ATACMS, Patriot missiles and battle tanks. And our manufacturing base is in China.
Trump will not secure peace by threatening military action against Russia. Not if he wants to have his war with Iran and then China.
The whole thing is so crazy that it makes my teeth hurt, but there’s a method to the madness. From the Gulf of Tonkin with the ghost torpedo boats, to the invasion of Iraq with its non-existent weapons of mass destruction, to Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion, the corporate media engages in a continuous propaganda PSYOP, manufacturing consent for endless war.
I’ve recently discovered that the DOGE-bags have a plan, and it’s not simply to move fast and break things.
It’s called the Dark Enlightenment, and “seeks to implement authoritarianism with a combination of elite technocrats (as in the IT type, not the older notion of “high subject matter skills”) and AI in charge.”
Singapore is their explicit model for America’s future. During his reign, [Lee Kuan Yew, aka LKY, Singapore’s former leader] successfully fused pro-corporate economics and state socialism, creating a distinctly Libertarian ideals of social and political control. This is LKY’s model: economic development above all else—even human rights. A “soft” authoritarianism, as Fareed Zakaria has called it. “The exuberance of democracy,” LKY explained, “leads to indiscipline and disorderly conduct, which are inimical to development.”
While the idea of a US of Singapore sounds creepily dystopian, I’m pretty sure the DOGE-bags lack the competence to pull that off. Instead, it’s good bet that they end up turning the US into Russia of the 90’s, ruled by Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs. Rather than a clean, orderly business environment, the DOGE-bags are more likely to recreate a looted countryside and plummeting life expectancy. A hellish dystopia, with armed guards, private militias, and gated enclaves coupled with vast slums.
At this point it’s probably a good time to talk about the elephant-in-the-room. Why the hell does some quasi-official organization have the power to wield a chainsaw to government agencies and personal? It’s hard to follow their trail of destruction, but DOGE appears to be the plaything of Elon Musk. The fact that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not because of his acumen of political or economic theory. He’s able to do it because the fuck-turd has several hundred billion dollars.
Because he has several hundred billion dollars Musk’s mad vision is our brave new reality. But Musk didn’t come out of central casting as an evil villain. The inequality, the decades of policy and regulatory failures that led up to Elon Musk’s net worth, were the precondition for all of the insanity that is now playing out. Rich people hated the New Deal with it’s leveling of the playing field between capital and labor and set about to dismantle it.
And here we are.
Decades of regressive wealth redistribution not only worsened the poverty experienced at the bottom of the class system but, at the top, produced a coterie of billionaires whose wealth allowed them to dominate our political systems, ensuring that they could only fail upward, sanguine that any act of excessive risk taking would be bailed out by the neoliberal state.
The billionaires have won the class war and that’s why Musk/DOGE is running amuck.
Unfortunately, bad shit happens when you loose oligarchs on the world,
Americans who voted for Trump must be wondering if MAGA meant MIGA, due to the president’s recent actions. Trump is arresting, sanctioning, censoring, threatening and bombing, all to advance Israel’s interests. What’s even more detestable is that Trump is doing all of it even as the “only democracy in the Middle-East” resumes its savage genocide in Gaza.
Did I mention primarying? Trump is calling for US Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, to be primaried and removed from Congress because of his lack of blind devotion to the state of Israel. Notably, Massie, in an interview, revealed to Tucker Carlson that he was the only one in Congress without an AIPAC babysitter. AIPAC stands for American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, and is a pro-Israel lobbying group that advocates its policies to the legislative and executive branches of the United States. Massie says the babysitters are part of an all encompassing effort to ensure no one in Congress votes against the complete and unconditional support for Israel.
I don’t know why Trump is doing this. Maybe it’s just money? He took hundreds of millions from the Adelson’s, whose sole focus is Israel. Maybe Mossad has Epstein sex tapes, depicting Trump fucking a minor? Maybe it’s because he is, after all, a real estate developer and his son in law, Jared Kushner, wants a beach resort in Gaza on top of dead Palestinians? Maybe he really believes the cover story about Israel being our best bosom-buddy?
What matters are his actions, and his responsibility.
In a nod towards bi-partisanship, Trump is picking up just where Biden, his genocidal predecessor, left off. However, Trump is proving even more zealous than Biden in his devotion to Israel. His administration is seizing control of universities and ordering them to shut down all criticism of Israel among the student body, and chillingly, abducting Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil for leading last year’s student protests at Columbia University and attempting to deport him for protesting the mass murder of children in Gaza. The White House claims that Khalil poses a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States” for taking a staunch stance against genocide.
Trump has now ordered the US military to conduct airstrikes on Yemen. The US is bombing Yemen again after Houthi leaders announced that their blockade on Israeli shipping would resume due to Israel’s siege on Gaza. While US officials have framed the bombing campaign in Yemen as a way to protect the US military and American shipping, it was really launched in response to the Houthis saying they would reimpose its blockade on Israeli shipping over Israel imposing a total blockade on Gaza, a major violation of the ceasefire deal signed in January.
Trump had a genuine opportunity to achieve a peace deal in the region that would have protected the rights of the Palestinians. But he has pissed that away and is clearly under the control of the Zionist lobby. Instead of making peace, Trump is pursuing war with the Palestinians, the Houthis and perhaps Iran.
The Houthis, or Ansar Allah, are the only entity in the world taking military action to try and stop the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. During the ceasefire, they stopped attacking ships trading with Israel. Recently, when Israel cut off all food and aid, they gave Israel four days warning: restore the aid or we start the attacks again. Then they did, and now Trump is bombing Yemen again. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, leader of Ansar Allah, made it all very clear in his March 16 speech: “Our decision to support the Palestinian people, including our move to block Israeli maritime navigation, that clearly targets the Israeli enemy and no one else, is aimed solely at pressuring Israel to open the crossings, allow the entry of humanitarian aid, and put an end to the starvation of Gaza.”
Biden deployed two separate Carrier Strike Groups (CSGs) to the Red Sea. Anyone remember Prosperity Guardian? However, the CSGs were compelled to withdraw when they ran out of anti-aircraft missiles. The Saudis tried for years to get control over Yemen and were defeated. Ansar Allah responded to the previous attacks with volleys of drones and missiles, closing the Red Sea in the process.
With the latest attacks, Ansar Allah has targeted the US aircraft carrier, Harry S. Truman, and it’s only a question of time until it hits a U.S. war ship and causes casualties. Trump has already blamed Iran for Ansar Allah’s attacks, and said there would be “dire consequences” (for Iran) if the attacks continued. It certainly appears that he’s dragging the United States into a war with Iran to repay the powerful Zionists who got him elected.
However, it is not at all certain that the US would prevail in a war with Iran. In fact—judging by the war games that have been used to simulate the conflagration—US Forces would lose. But these exercises only modeled a conventional conflict. Ominously, behind the scenes, as the Pentagon prepares for a “major” regional war with Iran, the use of nuclear weapons is on the table.
To MAGA supporters, I ask–where are the American interests in all of this?
And, this is where we are going to talk about power relations. There are American interests in endless war for empire and I’ll bet you can think of a few? The military/industrial/complex, with all of the intertwined connections to Silicon Valley and Wall Street are key beneficiaries. In other words, the endless wars for empire benefit a small cohort of wealthy and powerful Americans.
These are the kinds of people that American society rewards–scum. The more ruthless and duplicitous you are willing to be, the easier it is for you to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. Our system, with it’s perverse incentives, rewards and elevates sociopathy, which is why we find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.
Many in our society are increasingly aware that our economy essentially exists to victimize them. It deliberately promotes inequality, exploitation of the most vulnerable through abusive employment practices, and preying on the least well off by excessive charges for interest and rent. Concurrently, the non-stop advertising depicting beautiful, happy people enjoying products and experiences that the average American can only dream of simply reinforces the vast inequality.
And now the beatings will continue until moral improves. The DOGE-bags, with their savage cuts, mass firings and threats to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, are certainly stacking the kindling for the kind of conflagration that could turn the country into a war zone. In a move that portends future violence, DOGE is targeting the Veterans Administration (VA). Thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the VA now faces disruption of its benefit claims handling, health care delivery, data security,critical medical research, and stable employment for one hundred thousand former service members.
Maybe someone ought to explain to the DOGE brain-trust that it’s not a bright move to target a demographic that was taught to close-with-and-destroy-the-enemy. Especially not smart to fuck with special forces veterans who were trained in irregular warfare and insurgency. America is awash with weapons and you’re giving veterans a reason to hurt you.
Most Americans living through the second Gilded Age don’t remember, but the first one was replete with violence. Labor actions and protests were met with armed strike breakers and corporate militia massacres. The Pinkerton Detective Agency targeted labor organizers and fought pitched battles with strikers. Workers and Anarchists responded with bombings and assassinations.
It’s ironic that Trump idolizes President McKinley, who was president during the first Gilded Age and the beginning of the American empire, while Trump presides over the second Gilded Age and final chapter of the American empire.
Fredrick Douglas wrote–“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Douglass’s statement, written in 1857 on the eve of the Civil War, is just as true today as then.
What’s troubling is the glee some Americans are showing in response to the mass layoffs in government. The lack of solidarity among working and middle-class Americans points to the ease of divide and rule, but it will be interesting to see how MAGA-land likes it when the loss of the these government jobs impacts their businesses and local economies. Fifty odd years of neoliberal ideology has had a profound impact on Americans, but ideology certainly doesn’t clothe, house or feed you.
Nevertheless, I believe our future promises to be an era full of contradictions–where conservative, military types make common cause with leftist union members, in the face of poverty and destitution.
What’s clear is that the old Social Contract is being torn up before our eyes. Our feral elite no longer expect the co-operation and support of Americans, and are increasingly placing their bets on the national security state, with its surveillance and violence.
All of those militarized police are certainly going to be busy.
And this raises a larger question–Where is the inflection point, when Americans give up on politics and embrace violence as a solution?
John F. Kennedy wrote–” Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Update: Protestors from St. Louis to Charlotte, Tucson to Palo Alto, and New York City to Portland are raging against one oblong machine—and the guy in charge of it. In response to Musk’s growing power within the Trump administration—and that gesture he made at the inauguration—protests have targeted showrooms, dealerships, charging stations, and the Cybertruck itself in an attempt to meddle with Musk’s finances and highlight how he’s meddling with federal spending programs.
The outlines of America’s future are coming into focus and it’s not pretty. Welcome to techno-feudalism, a term coined by Yanis Varoufakis to describe the new economic reality where the tech-lords that control platforms like X, Amazon, Meta, and Google, stand astride our economy, like the Robber Barons of the 19th Century.
And that points to a larger picture. The return to a pre-New-Deal economic order assisted by pervasive misgovernment is not an accident, nor the work of a few bad actors. The techno-feudalism, with its accompanying corruption and vast inequality, is a consequence of a triumph of a particular ideology–neoliberalism–that considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. Neoliberalism celebrates human capital and mandates economic concentration and the privatization of governmental functions.
Predictably, this state of affairs has a bi-partisan pedigree. It’s illustrative that the Silicon Valley billionaires were feted by the Democrats, who assumed they would remain loyal benefactors. Except they have now swung over to Trump and ripped off the faux woke masks and revealed the true hierarchical, eugenicist nature of the country’s tech capital. The Democrats wanted a kinder-gentler neoliberal disposition but paved the way for Trump by largely pursuing the same policies over the years–just at a slower pace. There’s a historical reason that you don’t allow great concentrations of wealth. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out. “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”
At this stage I think it’s safe to say that neoliberalism, for all of it’s dressed-up intellectualism and economic jargon, is simply a looting caper, with Trump and Musk presiding over the final stages. In fact, the looting of the US by Silicon Valley and Wall Street is going into overdrive under the Trump Administration and DOGE. True to form, rather than mounting a defense of core New Deal/Great Society programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Democratic Party thinks criticizing Trump’s false statements and doubling down on support for Ukraine is a winning formula. Indeed, some Democrats even voiced support for DOGE’s mission of taking a wrecking ball to the government so that private corporations can profit off the pieces.
The larger reality is that the US is in irreversible decline.Everyone missed the key takeaway from Vance and Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky, but the US can’t afford Biden’s Ukraine adventure and, perhaps, NATO any more. We should not be surprised. I’ve stated repeatedly that you can’t run an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system. This dynamic is crystal clear in the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, where the US weapons cupboard is bare because the geniuses decided to offshore our manufacturing.
Ian Welsh lays out the graphic details. “Just like the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was a sign of Russia’s decline, so is the ending of NATO. US carrier groups no longer have a full set of supporting ships: America can’t make them run any more. America’s flagship aircraft builder can’t make reliable planes any more. Trump is starting a crypto reserve. Social benefits are being slashed, yet again, in massive ways. America is behind in 80% of techs and at the same time launching a concerted attack on research universities. It couldn’t build enough weapons and ammunition to fully support Ukraine and in a real war against China or Russia would run out of munitions in about two weeks, then get the shit kicked out of it. It’s also destroying the WTO and other agreements created by it: it’s dismantling its Empire because, simply, it can’t afford it any more.”
The dirty little secret and the underlying reason for American decline is that our elite have become divorced from average Americans, thanks to the individualism and greed-is-good neoliberal-sociopathy coupled with broad political and media support. The American state can no longer reliably win its wars, or produce broad-based economic growth, let alone claim some normative global leadership role. All it can do is insulate its elites from accountability and protect them from the consequences of their extractive depredations. American elites assert their power by not paying taxes, and avoiding prosecutions. We only have to gaze upon our president to realize that to be a member of the elite is to not be held to account. The absence of pretense underlying Trump’s actions, however, suggests an exhausted imperial sovereignty.
Liberals love to associate Trump with Putin but the Yeltsin era in Russia, with the oligarchs, corruption and organized crime, is far more fitting, and appropriate, because what went on in Russia during the 1990’s was just a practice run. Now the show’s coming home, with an already-created oligarch class poised to assume their techno-feudal role.
The US political and media elite are having a meltdown now that Trump is poised to bring the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine to a close.
Everyone from Rachel Maddow to BernieSanders is freaking out over the Trump administration’s moves toward ending the war in Ukraine. David Hogg, now the vice chair of the DNC, said on Twitter that “If we abandon Ukraine — Poland is next. You know what’s going to be a lot more expensive than finishing this war and forcing Putin out of Ukraine? A third world war and a second Marshall plan.”
These histrionics are as depraved as they are ridiculous. I’m surprised Hogg didn’t invoke Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlin and Hitler, somewhere in there.
While Trump is being castigated in the corporate media for saying Ukraine started the war, he’s only somewhat truthful. Actually, it was the US who pushed Ukraine into the tragic proxy war that has decimated Ukraine and left millions dead and wounded. Ultimately, the US political, economic, and national security elite are all responsible. They only are able to amplify the outrage against peace due to their head-lock on the meta-narrative.
Going further, the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, has been accompanied by a ocean of lies, and a censorship effort the like we’ve never seen, where murderers can be transmuted into martyrs and villains into heroes. And, now, the only way the neocons and their liberal-international playmates can deal with the butt-hurt is to blame Trump and portray him as beholden to Putin and call anything that challenges their narrative–Russian propaganda. Not because the facts are wrong, but because Russia is saying it. Essentially, Russia is never right, and the U.S. and its allies are never wrong.
When the Americans hears these phrases like “unprovoked invasion”, “Putin is Hitler”, “beacon of democracy” over and over, day in and day out, week after week, they fall into a trancelike state, not unlike a cult or primitive religion. When the media repeated 24/7 the exact same wordings about the ‘unprovoked Russian invasion’ of ‘democratic Ukraine’, many viewers became like characters undergoing the 2-minute-hate, in Orwell’s 1984, where “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”
Since Operation Mockingbird, the symbiotic relationship between the media and the deep state has never changed. The false narrative machine is constantly adapted to manufacture consent and serve political purposes for the ruling class. The objective is not to report facts, provide balanced analysis but to put adversaries of the US in a negative light and question their illegitimacy. Just to take one endlessly repeated slur–the idea that Putin is reconstructing the Russian empire is childish propaganda. However, it’s been lapped up by NY Times reading liberals, flying their Ukrainian flags.
I know it’s the way-back-machine but the US’s regime-change machinations against Russia, by way of Ukraine, were never much of a secret. There was this RAND study, that advocated overextending Russia through NATO expansion and color revolutions on the periphery. And one of the earliest threats came from Carl Gersham, the long-time director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Gershman, wrote in 2013, before the Kiev coup: “Ukraine is the biggest prize.” If it could be pulled away from Russia and into the West, he said, then “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
I was blogging during this time and it was always obvious that since the Maidan coup in 2014 that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin and plunder Russia under the tender rule of a Yeltsin-clone. The Maidan coup in 2014 is what began the domino effect that led to the current proxy war.
What’s shocking and unknown, thanks to that censorship thing I mentioned, is that the 2014 Ukraine coup was galvanized by false flag event. The reason cited by the U.S. government and supporters of “Maidan” for the legitimacy of Yannakovitch’s removal was a sniper massacre that took place in Ukraine’s “Independence Square” where 48 protestors were killed and hundreds injured. However, newly released evidence researched by Ukrainian-Canadian professor of political science at the University of Ottawa Ivan Katchanovski shows that Yannakovitch did not order the massacre, Russian agents were not involved, and the killing was in fact done by far-right elements of the Maidan protests in order to give a justification for the coup against Yanukovych.
Again, we return to the wayback machine to recall State Department honcho, Victoria Nuland, bragging about the $5 billion spent to mid-wife the 2014 coup, and instructing US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt to “Fuck the EU,” while the US armed Ukraine in the civil-war against Russian separatists in the Donbass. With U.S. backing, the unconstitutional government on April 16, 2014 launched a military attack against those two provinces in the Donbass region. This is how Ukraine stated the war and the date they did it on. Trump didn’t mention the instrumental part the U.S. played in Yanukoych’s ouster and Kiev’s subsequent war on Donbass. The CIA, MI6 and the government they installed in Ukraine began covert operations against Russia from the first day after the coup, before Russia took Crimea and a revolt started in Donbas.
What’s even more infuriating is that the architects of the tragedy will face no judgement or repercussions. Blinken, Sullivan and Nuland will still enjoy all the perks and status of remaining part of the foreign policy elite. Then there’s Trump, former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, NATO and the EU, who all helped throw Ukraine into the meat grinder while countless Western experts and analysts warned urgently that their actions would result in Ukraine’s destruction.
If there was any justice they all would be DOGED.
But of course we all know they won’t. None of the deep state apparatchiks, politicians, media whores, and think-tank denizens who helped destroy Ukraine will suffer any consequences of any kind for their atrocities. Nobody will even lose their career. And what’s worse is knowing that most of them will re-emerge like vampires from the grave to manufacture support with their media sycophants for the next war.
Returning to the matter at hand, Trump is deeply flawed, but he is exposing the deep state for all to see and they are not happy, as the reaction to the peace proposals demonstrate.
Restoring ties with Russia and negotiating a settlement of the Ukraine war would be big-enough blows to the deep state’s interests. Trump sought to restore US/Russian relations but was thwarted by Russia-gate. Russia-gate also was central to the effort of drawing in liberals, whose antipathy towards Trump and Putin, made them willing participants. Trump’s proposal for a new détente with Russia was childishly belittled in mainstream media during his first term, and he was simultaneously gay-baited for his affection for Putin, and attacked for having raunchy sex with hookers who pissed on him.
While Trump and his administration, with their actions, have taken a bat to the permanent bureaucratic state, we are still in the first innings, to overuse a baseball analogy. However, if the White House is really ready to discuss this with Moscow as part of the process of restoring normal relations between Russia and the United States, this is a truly revolutionary event for American foreign policy.
Meanwhile, all of this is quite fluid and extremely complicated, with multiple moving pieces. Trump may sound well-intentioned about ending the war. But it is concerning that his administration does not take any responsibility for starting it. He comes across as an opportunist whose lack of principles is problematic at best and treacherous at worst. However, he does have a good memory for betrayal. It seems that Trump learned some valuable lessons from his dealings with the deep state during his first term.
Geo-political analyst, Alastair Crooke, lays out the conflict–“The Deep State, it seems, were not paying attention to what a posse of ‘populist’ outliers, tucked away from the rarefied Beltway talking shop, were up to: They (the outliers) were planning a concerted attack on the Federal expenditure spigot – identified as the weak spot about which a Constitutional challenge could be mounted that would derail – in its entirety – the expenditures of the Deep State. It seems that one aspect to the surprise has been the Trump Team’s discipline: ‘no leaks’. And secondly, that those involved in the planning are not drawn from the preeminent Anglo-sphere, but rather from a strand of society that was offended by the Iraq war and which blames the ‘Anglo-sphere’ for ‘ruining’ America.
The MIC in concert with the EU’s ‘Brussels’ Technocratic State as nothing other than a pure offshoot to the American Deep State – and therefore very likely to try to torpedo and sink Trump’s initiative to normalize relations with Moscow. Then there’s the Ukrainian “tyrant”, Zelensky. As the Trump administration attempts to extricate itself from the proxy war there is a chance that Zelensky could go rogue and threaten to release compromising details of US involvement in the war.”
We need to temper our expectations for a comprehensive peace settlement. There are too many issues, including the president’s wacky mineral and rare earths demand, that threaten to derail the negotiations.
Update: The Democrats never fail to fail. Here’s Bernie parroting neocon orthodoxy. “Trump berates Zelensky, the leader of a democratic country courageously fighting Russian imperialism, while he allies himself with Putin, a dictator who started the bloodiest European war in 80 years. Sorry, President Trump. We believe in democracy, not authoritarianism.”
Democrats need to make a decision. They can either continue their decades-long accommodation of billionaires, banks and corporate interests, while deploying Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) to massage the consciences of liberal America without upsetting the power structure, or embrace an agenda that directly challenges concentrated economic power. But simply condemning the Trump government will not be enough.
The material needs of working-class Americans continue to be obscured and co-opted by team red and blue. While Republicans and the right address some of these problems, they do so by luring people through bombastic rhetoric and culture-war BS. On the other side, Democrats and liberals police and enforce a DEI, cancel-culture paradigm built by elites that diverts working-class Americans from ever engaging in meaningful connection and change.
DEI draws it’s legitimacy from the civil rights movement but Martin Luther King Jr. was not just concerned with simply diversifying corporate or government offices with a few black or brown faces in places of power. His goal was to redistribute economic power to the masses of people who don’t have it, including white people. In the run up to MLK’s famous “I have a Dream” speech the civil rights leaders discussed their goals. They spent little time discussing the need to train racist white people out of their attitudes. They didn’t talk about their choice of pronouns or how they pined for a black woman as press secretary at the White House. Instead, they talked about the needs of ordinary people who were being denied the opportunity to live decent lives. For example, the full name of the famous 1963 march was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”
This story rarely gets told because any criticism of DEI gets you labeled as a racist or sexist or transphobe, but that’s unfortunate because Trump is doing liberals and the Democrats a favor in eliminating DEI and taking away their bogus cover story.
Now, instead of carping about Trump’s diabolical “populism” the Democrats have the opportunity to dial up an authentic economic populism and define themselves as the champions of working- and middle-class Americans against the oligarchs. The upcoming political battles with Trump will provide the Democrats a fresh opportunity for a resurrection of a New-Deal populism. Not just the extent of corporate power, but also over the wealth and influence of the 1 percent and oligarch class that will provide them an opportunities to declare a principled opposition to powerful corporations, condemn their lawbreaking, and put forward legislation offering concrete material benefits.
A capitalist country, such as the US, will always have a political party that represents capital, but it becomes problematic when both parties do. We desperately need a labor party in this country and presently the Democrats are not it. Rather than a liberal pejorative, populism is a political approach to thinking about the power big business and oligarchs like Elon Musk hold over our daily lives and finances, and addressing that power through policy and the law to ensure it is dispersed away from corporations and billionaires to workers, consumers, and honest businesses. It’s returning to the roots of a constitutional republic, where the present financial monarchy is to be restrained by the separation of powers and laws our founders envisioned.
It’s like politics for dummies.
Unfortunately, the Democrats are downright allergic to any policies their billionaire benefactors disapprove of, as the treatment by the Biden Administration of it’s amazingly successful anti-trust efforts. In one of the few bright spots, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department cracked down on corporate mergers and dusted off decades-old anti-trust laws as justification, but Biden and Harris treated this as radioactive. Billionaire Democratic donors Barry Diller and Reid Hoffman provided a clue for this behavior when they instructed presidential nominee Kamala Harris to fire FTC head Lina Khan for her successful efforts at blocking more economic concentration.
As a result of this and decades of such behavior, I believe the Democratic Party is too far gone to change course. It’s human nature, when the magnitude of your error is so huge, there is no way you can have even reach self criticism. They can’t admit they were wrong. Instead, as we saw with the Democrats treatment of Bernie Sanders, the professional/managerial/caste (PMC), who comprise the party, view left-wing populism with revulsion and project DEI as a magic-shield of virtue.
Diversity politics has long been an elite project–a way for major corporations or government offices to whitewash themselves with a few token hires or irrelevant seminars or programs that send the signal to America’s liberals that they’re the good guys. In the wake of de-industrialization and the off-shoring of millions of middle-class jobs the PMC sided with capital, preferring to kick down, while sucking-up to the billionaires it once despised.
In 2020 every Fortune 500 company in America was humping diversity, equity and inclusion, because it was painless. They certainly were not paying their employees more or urging the US government to implement universal paid leave and guaranteed health care. Diversity politics has given them a way to painlessly massage the consciences of liberal America without upsetting the power structure at all. There’s a reason that everyone from corporate CEOs to the leaders of elite school districts were so comfortable embracing Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Nothing these anti-racist writers said or did actually threatened the power structure in America. Instead, the focus on DEI is classic divide and rule, deployed by the PMC to maintain their status as the political and economic elite.
Leftist intellectuals used to recognize that identity-politics was a cul-de-sac. They properly understood that promoting ethnic chauvinism or racial set asides does little to solve the big problems in any ethnic community let alone the wider country. Today, this seems like something only Marxists and conservatives debate, as liberals have ceded the field to critical theory and DEI fixation.
The 2024 election made it obvious that voters comprehensively rejected this status quo which has been catastrophic for the majority of Americans, going all the way back to NAFTA, but also including Gaza and the proxy-war in Ukraine, and the neocon/Democratic foreign policy establishment that produced it.
Tellingly, the Democrats reject out of hand arguments that Trump’s victory signals a need to reconsider their neoliberal economic policies and continue to insist that redistributive social and economic policies are less meaningful to voters than cultural or racial group identities. For the past decade, neoliberal Democrats have been particularly insufferable in wielding it as a weapon to advance pro-corporate politics, whether it’s Hillary Clinton saying that breaking up the big banks wouldn’t end racism and sexism, or MSNBC anchors and politicians like Barack Obama endlessly complaining about Bernie Sanders being a white man who didn’t talk enough about race and gender.
It’s fitting that the Democrats reliance on DEI and identity politics as their virtuous talisman has backfired, but it sucks for the rest of us. Now that Americans are tired of the hectoring Trump and the DOGE minions have hit on what they think is a winning formula. Whenever they want to eliminate government agencies, fire staffers or allow one of their crony corporations to plunder the commons, they just say they’re fighting “Wokeness” or “DEI.”
Update: Lambert at Naked Capitalismlays out the stakes. “I think it’s pretty simple: The Republicans are directly assaulting the economic capital of the Democrat base, the PMC, by taking their jobs away. This is true whether the assault be on NGOs (foreign and domestic), DEI administrators, or government workers, including scientists (with more assaults on teachers to come). In addition, the PMC face the ascendancy, indeed the formidable combination, of two demon figures: Putin and Trump.”
The US has long maintained a largely invisible, highly effective propaganda system, described by CIA official, Frank Wisner, as the mighty Wurlitzer,” on which he could play any propaganda tune.
Back then the CIA maintained a network of writers, journalists and talking-heads, who operated as agents, disseminating an approved narrative, code named Operation Mockingbird. Mockingbird was a large-scale CIA program that started in the early years of the Cold War and manipulated domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes.
These days, they run the whole thing off-the-books, through NGO’s. President Trump’s decision to cut funding to USAID revealed the extent to which the US government has been financing so-called independent media, protests and other means to hijack civil society around the world.
It was Obama who codified the new construct. “In his last days in office … President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war, a war that fused the security infrastructure with the social media platforms – where the war supposedly was being fought”.
The collapse of the legacy, corporate media and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, had made it possible for the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party to sell a narrative, and reconfigure social attitudes, prejudices and policy preferences in entirely new ways.
Plus ça change.
Trump’s purge of USAID revealed the extent of Obama’s social-media Mockingbird. It turns out that the government organization had been funding numerous alternative media outlets. From Wikileaks: “USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, “Internews Network” (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and “training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives…“
Despite claims of “independence” these media organs amounted to a state media. USAID funded Politico, which was the source for countless other so-called independent media like the BBC, the New York TimesCNN and NBC. In other words, in one way or another almost all of the western media is funded by the US government.
Something to think about.
Just like everything else in today’s “Newspeak“, the term “democracy” means the repression of dissenting voices, “peace” describes funneling more weapons to overt Nazi and genocidal regimes. Now, it turns out that “independent media” refers to an almost entirely government funded operation. The aim was for this “independent media,” funded by USAID, and armed with laptops and smart phones, to promulgate the latest inspired Party meme and to immediately repeat, and repeat it, across platforms, giving the appearance of an overwhelming tide of consent. And thus giving people the “permission structure” of apparent wide-spread public support to believe propositions that formerly they would never have supported.
If you have liberal family and friends, I’m pretty sure you understand what I’m talking about? Or, before Trump’s arrival, conservative family and friends mesmerized by Fox News?
In our post Citizens United world it’s more than apparent that with enough money, political operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that they had never believed; or even heard of before: Were in fact not only plausible, but already widely administered throughout the world by USAID, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the other alphabet agencies that make up the national security state.
Of course, the usual suspects chimed in to muddy the water. Liberals wailed that USAID was simply benevolent American foreign aid, administered by a cadre of dedicated public service workers, and that all the talk of USAID’s un-democratic actions abroad are conspiracy theories and Russian disinformation. while the right portrayed USAID as the second coming of the Comintern, busy spreading Marxism. Most Americans are only dimly aware of US foreign policy, leaving plenty of space for propaganda.
The reality is that US foreign policy has been outsourced to a bevy of NGO’s, funded by USAID, who operate a shadow government. Most of these NGOs were born during the Reagan years. While not all USAID and State Department funding flows through them, they control the purse strings for much of America’s global financial influence. Rather than altruism, the goals are corporate penetration, resource access, and a docile low-cost labor, in the countries targeted.
Matt Kennard in his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire,” documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South. Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments.
The crimes on the empire’s periphery always return to the homeland. All of the regime-change mischief and color revolutions carried out in hostile countries, came back when Trump was elected in 2016. The NGO’s funded by USAID were instrumental in Russia-gate, the two impeachments aimed at Trump, and the false claim that the Hunter Biden story was a Russian hoax.
Liberals used to believe in the 1st Amendment and support a polity that encouraged debate, dissent, skepticism and free speech, but now they have turned on a dime and advocate narrative control and censorship. Since Trump’s election liberals have become more authoritarian, and more repressive of dissent. What ironic is that liberals have come to believe their own propaganda and they’re trapped in an echo chamber of which the USAID. support of “independent” media plays a very significant role.
It will be fascinating to read Noam Chomsky’s reaction to the further confirmation of the ways in which the American empire goes about Manufacturing Consent. In their groundbreaking expose Chomsky and Edward S. Herman detail a propaganda model enacted through government and corporations and “powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”, by means of the propaganda model of communication.”
USAID funding and promoting “independent media” amounts to the a modern day manufacturing consent for the American empire. Moreover, the USAID exposure should call into question the campaign against “disinformation.” How is this not the biggest case of disinformation?
It’s also a blatant attack on the Constitution and represents a flagrant disregard for the role of an informed citizenry in exercising our rights and responsibility to freely elect to public office those whom we believe best represent our values, and to hold those thus elected accountable for what they do in our name.
Unfortunately, a state media can simply disappear such oddities and questions down the memory hole.
Update: USAID has many dedicated workers and engages in many charitable, critical activities worldwide: Social and economic development programs, health and nutrition programs, irrigation and drainage projects, disease eradication, environmental remedies. I would like to believe that if all the USAID did was dole out charity overseas, it would still be in business.
The next four years are set to be a wild ride, but I intend to thread the middle.
By that I mean that to defeat Trump we must scrutinize, modify and adapt our resistance. Furthermore, we cannot fail to acknowledge that the red/blue cultural war is a serious distraction from seeing the US economic/political/military reality, where both parties and their corporate media cheerleaders, not just Trump, are malign actors causing serious harm. I wrote this last week: “I despise Trump for totally different reasons than the average American liberal, but for the same reasons I despise Biden and the Democrats and hold them responsible for their series of disasters, crimes and genocides.”
I’m mulling this over as we make the transition from one evil to another. While a distraction, the red/blue cultural war is dangerous because ideologues on both sides are irrational, where reason is wasted and so there is a need to tread carefully. The tussle over Trump eliminating USAID is a good example. Liberals are defending a government entity they argue is spreading democracy and universal values but USAID is also a CIA cutout that facilitates color revolution regime-change ops, while propagandizing the American public. The agency was created in 1961, at the height of the Cold War, by President Kennedy in order to administer aid programs that fostered economic and social development in foreign countries. It sounded nice on paper. In reality, the agency became a powerful force in America’s global pacification efforts. USAID quickly developed a reputation for savagery, where it trained death squads, schooled foreign police departments in effective torture techniques, and utilized black propaganda.
Naturally, the Democrats, who, with Russia-gate, have transformed into cheerleaders for the intelligence agencies that comprise the deep state, are opposed and have been protesting in front of USAID headquarters after President Trump agreed to shut USAID down. This is your Democratic Party, where there’s been no protest about Trump’s assault on the National Labor Relations Board, but they love them some spooks.
It’s not that Trump’s actually popular, he’s not. After promising a populist revolution to help American workers it appears that he’s poised to govern like all of the Republicans since Reagan by reducing taxes on capital, on the rich, and increasing taxes on the labor on workers, especially the lowest income workers.
Here’s where we need to pause. Both parties and the corporate media have brought us to this point with their policies. The Biden Administration was mostly a continuation of neoliberal economics and one of the main reasons Kamala Harris lost was that the the Democrats were associated largely with an inflation driven by their corporate benefactors. Indeed, the interest of the donors who contributed $1.1 billion to Harris was always purely transactional and (as events have proven) they rapidly switched their allegiance to Trump. So the national Democrats have absolutely no one that can serve as a plausible opponent to any Trump policies, the Party’s historic pro-working class branding has been destroyed, and the Party totally lacks the money and infrastructure needed to move forward.
But Biden, or whoever was running the government, was just following a bipartisan trend of socialism for the rich and savage neoliberalism for American workers. This allowed the oligarch’s to loot the country, courtesy of their bought and paid for politicians. Critical mass was reached in the 1990s whereby the wealth of the oligarchs was increased to the point where it bought explicit political control.
It’s fitting that Donald Trump is a buyer and a seller in our post Citizens United world, as well as the most transactional president in our lifetime but what do they say about chickens coming home to roost?
The rise of neoliberalism brought a concerted decision made by capitalists with the explicit backing of the government that they would offshore and outsource US production to other countries because, of course, they wanted to exploit labor arbitrage. Everyone wants to forget this history in their zeal to blame Trump but the plutocrats who own the country hated the New Deal compromise with labor and have long sought to break the back of unions. Then there was the privatization of the commons, where American infrastructure was seized by corporations in the process erecting tollbooths and making the US economy high-cost. These were choices made by both parties, the corporate media, and all of the leading economists, who cheered the privatization and assured us that it was way more efficient than “big government.”
Trump seems set to exacerbate the problems with his ham-fisted tariffs. Because even if you put tariffs on everything, the US can’t produce anything because they’ve lost our factories as well as all of the manufacturing workers. It’s gonna take generations to bring back. And because the costs of production in the US are so high, because you have to give workers healthcare. You have to give workers education to their children. You have to give workers housing, but if all of that is insanely expensive because it’s all been privatized, it doesn’t matter if you have tariffs because those wages have to be higher to make up for the cost of education and healthcare and housing.
Then there’s the American empire. Democrats seriously seem to think all the outrage over Trump is going to magically erase Biden’s wholehearted support for the Israel genocide of Gaza, where the US provided the weapons, bombs, intelligence and most importantly deployed the whole of the western media/propaganda machine in an effort that Winston Smith would have recognized. I really don’t believe that everyone has forgotten the Democrats culpability. I think permanent damage has been done, especially in the eyes of young people. I think Americans will focus on Trump because he’s the president now and his abuses need to be highlighted and criticized, but I don’t think they’ll ever forget the way Biden and the Democrats showed us who they really were through 15 months of mass atrocities.
If that was not enough, there’s the US sponsored proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, where Blinken or Sullivan or one of the many deep state apparatchiks, thought it a good idea to lob rockets into Russia, while senile Biden nodded along.
The problems we face are bi-partisan yet there will be intense pressure to choose a side in the ongoing cultural war. A true intellectual critiques their country, party and themselves. The dirty little secret that none dare broach is that Trump is us. He represents and exemplifies what we’ve allowed this country to become, and we’re all culpable, myself included.
So here’s a important article by Mike Whitney, detailing the ways in which Trump is responsible for Hamas’s bust out of Gaza and Israel’s genocidal response.
And a taste–“So, with a wave of his hand, Trump broke with all of his presidential predecessors, all the applicable UN Resolutions, and with traditional US foreign policy dating back five decades. And this was just the beginning because—as we know now—the Abraham Accords set the dominoes in motion leading inexorably to the flattening of Gaza and the displacement of two million civilians. As author of the Accords, Trump is largely responsible for the unfolding catastrophe.
Keep in mind, the Accords really had nothing to do with peace or normalization. As senior fellow at the Arab Center Dana El Kurd said, “to frame the Abraham Accords as a “peace”(agreement) that increased stability between signatories is deliberately misleading….To be sure, Arab-Israeli normalization cannot be considered “peace,” but should rather be understood as authoritarian conflict management. Through this lens, it is possible to understand more clearly how the accords have changed the landscape of the region, and why pursuing such a policy makes for an unsustainable future…
“Authoritarian conflict management”?? What does that mean?
It means that the inducements for participation in the Accords had more to do with strengthening domestic repression than promoting regional peace.“
While it’s fun to laugh at the severe liberal butt-hurt caused by Trump’s re-election, it’s important to acknowledge the way in which the red/blue cultural war is a distraction from our comprehension of power.
I despise Trump for totally different reasons than the average American liberal, but for the same reasons I despise Biden and the Democrats and hold them responsible for their series of disasters, crimes and genocides.
Remember kids–follow the money, arms and resources, while disregarding the corporate media agitprop.
camelotkidd 