Inquiring minds want to know if there’s a connection between the US’s weaponization of terrorist proxies in Syria to overthrow the Bashar Assad regime and the truck attack in New Orleans? Has the war of terror come home?
A US military veteran killed 14 people when he drove a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans early New Year’s Day and was then killed in a shootout with police. The attacker Shamsud-Din Jabbar, reportedly had an ISIS flag on his truck at the time of the incident
Could this attack be blowback from US covert ops utilizing Sunni terrorists? It’s not out of the question since the US has supported al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations including ISIS for almost half a century since the heyday of the Soviet Afghan war.
In Syria, the rebels that the US. Turkey and the Gulf State allies have supported have been Sunni-terrorists, including al Qaeda and ISIS. The number one reason is simple: Sunni-terrorists make fanatical fighters. A close second is the fact that Sunni-terrorists can be proxies, or, if need be, patsies to scare hell out of the American public to support endless war and militarization. This dynamic was on display in Syria, when after unleashing ISIS to affect regime change, the US turned around and used the threat of ISIS as a way to intervene in Syria.
It’s useful to remember that in 2015, at the same time that the world was recoiling from the head-chopping savagery of ISIS, the US was secretly aiding their escalations. The US preference for ISIS was explained by Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry shockingly admitted that US planners actually welcomed the ISIS push toward Damascus, which they felt they could leverage to put pressure on Assad to give up power to the US-backed opposition.
I realize that it’s the United States of Amnesia, but am I the only one who remembers this?
The dirty little secret of the war-on-terror, is that the US cynically employs terrorists as either proxies or patsies to carry out its war-of-terror while waging a pretend war on terror. It’s not that the US doesn’t bomb and attack al Qaeda and ISIS once in a while, but at the same time they’ve been useful proxies and opportunistic patsies. That’s right, every presidential administration since Carter has either employed Sunni terrorists as proxies to carry out covert US foreign policies, or like Bush in seizing upon al Qaeda’s attacks as a pretext to advance already agreed upon plans for Middle-East conquest.
The problem with terrorist proxy monsters is that they can turn on their master. Mary Shelley wroteFrankenstein as a warning, and it’s a lesson that the US should have learned after 9/11 when the Sunni terrorists utilized to drive out the USSR from Afghanistan flew planes into the Twin Towers.
I don’t pretend to know what’s going on with all this. All I know is that the US is an extremely violent empire striving to maintain primacy and I’m pretty sure that if one their covert ops blows back to the homeland, it will be written off as “collateral damage.” It’s also a good idea to remain intensely skeptical of any and all narratives which might be used to manufacture consent for more war and militarization.
Update: The Cybertruck bomber, Matt Livelsberger, was a Green Beret, intelligence specialist who claims to have witnessed US Air Force bombing of civilians in Afghanistan. “I have knowledge of this program and also war crimes that were covered up during airstrikes in Nimruz province Afghanistan in 2019 by the admin, DoD, DEA and CIA. I conducted targeting for these strikes of over 125 buildings (65 were struck because of CIVCAS) that killed hundreds of civilians in a single day.USFORA continued strikes after spotting civilians on initial ISR, it was supposed to take 6 minutes and scramble all aircraft in CENTCOM. The UN basically called these war crimes, but the administration made them disappear. I was part of that cover-up with USFORA and Agent of the DEA. So I don’t know if my abduction attempt is related to either. I worked with GEN Millers IO staff on this as well as the response to Bala Murghab. AOB-S Commander at the time can validate this.
You need to elevate this to the media so we avoid a world war because this is a mutually assured destruction situation.
For vetting my Linkedin is Matt Berg or Matthew Livelsberger, an active duty 18Z out of 1-10 my profile is public. I have an active TSSCI with UAP USAP access.”
The Trump-Vance administration can engineer a political transformation if they can provide concrete material benefits to working-class Americans, who have seen their standard and quality of living collapse. If so, Trump has an opportunity to consolidate a durable realignment of US politics and policymaking that could last for a generation. Even if the Trump-Vance administration does a barely competent job of delivering material benefits for the working class, that would be better than what the two factions of the legacy uni-party have done for the past 40 years.
It’s illustrative to ask if the US government promotes the common good of its citizens? Looking at health, education and housing, we can say no. It appears that the purpose of the US State is to enrich the owners of capital.
Americans increasingly recognize that our system is broken and understand that instead of a democratic republic, the US more closely resembles an oligarchy. The American working classes are weary from surviving an unnecessarily violent and unjust society. We live amid staggering class, race, and gender-based stratification and life and death stakes everyday. Concurrently, there is a growing conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle-class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party. In the wake of Trump’s victory Bernie Sanders voiced a profound truth. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
It was hard to miss the broken landscape that lay open for Trump, but the establishments of both parties didn’t see it, and neither did most of the media, which had lost touch with the working class and their increasing anger.
For example, it’s now a popular idea that powerful people should just be shot in the street because the American system is too corrupt for justice to be carried out any other way. This isn’t a right-wing or left-wing view. In a new poll, more than two-thirds of respondents said they believed denials of coverage and profits in the health insurance industry were partially responsible for the killing of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, in early December. The affect of all the wealth redistribution upward over the last forty-plus years has been building slowly but surely and it shouldn’t be surprising that Americans applaud when a CEO is murdered by someone frustrated with corporate greed.
The food fight between MAGA and the tech bros over immigration is a symptom of the angst, and offers clues to the paradigm shift in political parties, where the Democrats have transformed from the party of workers to one that represents the professional/managerial/caste, while the Republicans tentatively articulate policies to aid workers. All of it constitutes a meta-political shift the likes of which haven’t been seen in the US since 1968.
Lambert, at Naked Capitalism, lays out the case. “It struck me forcibly than many MAGA supporters were in fact very well versed in policy, history, and data, and deployed their knowledge effectively against Musk and his tech bros. For example, H-1B is not about importing workers who are “highly skilled” (a pervasive, unexamined, and dishonest, tech bro talking point). That’s why, for example, Trump brought Mar-a-Lago waiters into the country under H-1B. Rather, H-1B is about importing workers who are cheap and compliant, because management can hold the threat of visa removal over their heads. That means that other things being equal, management will always prefer H-1Bs over citizens (the power imbalance, as idpol types would say).”
The elephant in the room is financialization. Tech and finance are so intertwined that it’s hard to tell where Silicon Valley ends and private/equity (PE) begins. And it’s apparent, by the destruction of labor wrought by PE over the last 40 years, how they feel about American workers. The capital behind Silicon Valley has successfully driven down STEM wages for American workers since the earliest days of globalization. The purpose of H-1B is, after all, labor arbitrage: cheap, compliant labor. It isn’t really complicated. A class of workers with reduced rights will obviously be preferred by management and will reduce the bargaining power of American workers.
Furthermore, it’s quite apparent that the tech billionaires don’t care about Americans, or even believe in nation-states at all, while caring about Americans is the core premise of MAGA. The H-1B debate is simply this fundamental conflict boiling up for the first time.
As you can see with the H-1B controversy, the GOP is torn between the tech bros, who represent capital, and MAGA, which represents labor, for the direction of the party under Trump. It’s an amazing development, an outright rejection of neoliberal and individualist ideology replaced wholesale by defiant exhortations towards nationalism and collectivism, stoked even higher by the open contempt on display by the elites. The GOP is now riding the populist tiger, and the battle over H-1B visa’s will provide a useful predictor on whether or not Trumpism will provide material benefits to Americans, or if they will follow the familiar GOP script of tax cuts and billionaire fellatio.
I know I’m not the only one who feels that this years Christmas is hollow and artificial.
We are supposed to celebrate Christ–the prince of peace–even as our elite make a mockery of that with their embrace of genocide, bombing and mass murder.
But it is not just Christmas that’s become hollow and meaningless; our entire Western culture is toxic, where the US with its European allies tries to forcibly maintain empire, all while maintaining a forced semblance of civilization and “rule based” order.
In one of the darkest years in memory, rather than succumb to cynicism and despair I must believe that there are good people out there and it really is darkest before the dawn.
The assassination of the CEO of United Health has galvanized social media with the majority of sentiment being approval, but this points to a larger issue.
Is not that the system is broken or isn’t working. It’s working just as planned. It’s critical to understand the practices of UnitedHealth and the wider health insurance industry as systemicand bound up with the larger dynamic of corporate rule and capitalism, in that UnitedHealth is a vital part of the system of for-profit-healthcare than we have in America. I think it matters whether we want to understand the health insurance industry and its evils as an exception rather than at the core of our fucked-up health care system – which, again, we might call the logic of financial capitalism or the corporate profit motive.
The public reaction to Luigi Mangione’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, clearly tapped Americans simmering rage at the for-profit-health model with its predatory health insurance gatekeeper. The media, business and government elites outraged at that public reaction – rather than at the corporate murderers perpetuating those mass deaths – just compound that anger with their refusal to recognize this broader context of corporate murder that Mangione’s act is embedded within.
Mangione’s attack on the “structural violence” is basic cause and effect. It also sets a dangerous precedent. Because one day someone flips out and kills a CEO, and others start talking about how wonderful CEO killing is.
Maybe they already are?
Perhaps making other people poor and miserable and killing their relatives might be a bad idea even for the sociopaths who rule us? Might it just be a good idea to care about people CEO’s don’t know, because one of them might get past his security one day?
It might just be that caring only about money and power while abandoning any sort of Noblesse Oblige is seriously short-sighted. Maybe looking out for other people is not just morally correct but also pragmatically so. Or you can bet on your bodyguards and the security of your gated communities, while praying that criminals don’t kidnap your kids or bomb their school.
Many think that a little fear among CEOs might restrain the worst excesses of corporate greed that drive the overreaching corporate murder and lawlessness.
Of course, the corporate media doesn’t see it this way. I fact it’s quite apparent by the coverage that they see their duty through a class lens. As we’ve created a second “Gilded Age” the corporate media has been cheerleading all of it. The Wall Street Journal and New YorkPost, as well as Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post editorial board, not only decried the widespread support for Mangione but launched furious rebuttals against legitimate criticism of the health insurance industry.
The reason for the media fear is simple: They are terrified of the idea that the American public wake up and understand that the class war is real, and identify the billionaire-class as the real villains. The killing of the UnitedHealth CEO has brought into the national consciousness the abusive, toxic, predatory practices of our corporate, for-profit-healthcare. One issue that all Americans, right, left and center can agree on. That’s scaring the hell out of our billionaire corporate overlords.
No one wants to live in a country where people feel so helpless and so incapable of receiving justice from the government that they start killing people. Unfortunately, the ruling elite of the United States have created a system where the masses of people have no ability to petition grievances, and the captured nature of the state means that it serves corporations and billionaires rather than the we the people. Any principles the state does have are constantly shifting, and with the bi-partisan nature of governance there is no method of redress. The problem is that the long-term trends—inequality, concentration of wealth and power, and the resulting inability of the political system to reflect the interests of regular people—is destroying America.
Despite Margaret Thatchers admonishment, there are societies and they work best when members care about people they’ll never meet. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in, with it’s “greed is good” and “there is no society” morality. Hedge funds buy companies, loads them down with debts, bankrupting them and destroying the lives of workers. “Banksters” blow up the economy with their insane greed, and get get bailed out. Then, not only do they avoid jail time but they still receive their bonuses based on fraud, while ordinary people lose jobs, homes and healthcare. Insurance companies and big-Pharma overprice their services, deny care and pay their CEO’s tens of millions of dollars.
The only silver lining here is that nobody fucking believes that we have the “best health care system in the world.” No one fucking cares about the abstract value of “choice” or getting to “keep your doctor.” Everybody is tired of getting surprise-charged thousands for routine tests. Even doctors, nurses and healthcare providers are tired of spending valuable time on the phone fighting with insurers over their medical recommendations.
The fact that people across the political spectrum reacted with glee to the murder of a health insurance CEO is a big tell, and not in a good way. Crazy things happen when the majority of people get very angry and have no legitimate political outlets for their legitimate rage. It would be ridiculous to create a situation like the one we have in America and not expect that the population will become radicalized and ultimately become violent.
Unfortunately, as the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, and the government continues to get more and more unaccountable and lawless, the elite are going to further militarize against the population. This means more cops, it means more censorship and crackdowns on dissident movements, it means more elite enclaves where the rulers are protected from the peasantry.
In fact, in the wake of the assassination, we’re already seeing exactly that. Not only is the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, charging Mangione with “terrorism” but New York Governor, Kathy Hochul, helda virtual meeting Tuesday with state law enforcement officials and about 175 corporate representatives to discuss sharing security resources.
Nice to see where government priorities are when it comes to CEO safety.
Contrast this with the sort of hand-waving response to school shootings. Maybe the CEO’s can have active shooter drills like grade schoolers?
Wesley Clark, a former US Army general, recounted a visit to the Pentagon a few weeks after 9/11, where he was shown a classified document that set out how the US was going to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran”.
Now that Syria has fallen, six of the seven countries mentioned in that famous memo have by now been thrown into chaos or destroyed. The U.S. has led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S. funding and arming Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA’s Timber Sycamore, during 2010’s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and Somalia (backing Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006).
As soon as the bogus ceasefire in Lebanon was signed Turkey, along with the US and Israel, unleashed their jihadist Syrian rebels, al-Qaeda spinoff Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), many of them foreigners, against Syria. These were exceptionally well armed and trained. They have night vision equipment, drones, artillery, Starlink communication and a capable, professional command.
It’s almost certain that the jihadists were aided by Western special forces–British SAS, SBS and US SEALS, Green Berets, Delta Force, etc. There is no organic Syrian revolution. There is the CIA-run counterrevolution. They sound the same, but are complete opposites. These hard men with guns are not, as CNN describes them, “freedom loving rebels”, but Sunni terrorists, similar to the Mujahideen that the US deployed in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Apparently there are “good” jihadists and “bad” jihadists. The former are those who do the bidding of the US and Israel to attack Muslim countries that resist the empire. The latter are those that apparently do not.
Moreover it will be interesting to see how the United States will reconcile the contradictions and pronounce a certified international terrorist organization (HTS) a legitimate government. HTS is a descendant of al Qaeda and ISIS, two terrorist organizations that Republican and Democrat administrations vowed to defeat in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). The US corporate media, following the messaging of the CIA / MI6, is frantically trying to paint HTS as a group of moderates who are tolerant of all ethnic groups and religious communities, the reality is otherwise, where this is the group which has transformed itself overnight from head-chopping jihadism into a moderate, “diversity-friendly” Syrian national resistance movement.
Meanwhile “liberals” are celebrating the end of the government of Bashar Assad after the stunning defeat by HTS, their zeal the result of years of war propaganda. (By the way, liberals are targeted more intensely with the expectation that “conservatives ” are already down with empire). The fact that HTS is essentially rebranded al Qaeda is one of the jarring cognitive dissonances that performative “liberals” celebrating the fall of Assad will probably skip over. Instead of the era of peace and stability now that the hated “dictator” is gone, the opposite will be the reality. Just ask the people in Libya who were liberated by the US and NATO.
Here, it’s worth reminding readers that in 2017, a leaked State Department memo explained in plain language that it’s standing US policy to overlook the abuses of US allies while denouncing the abuses of US enemies in order to undermine enemies. The memo showed neocon State Department official Brian Hook schooling a incoming Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, that “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. Thanks to Julian Assange and Wikileaks we get a peak into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook informed Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.
There will be much pious editorializing among our political and corporate media class about how Assad was a horrible dictator ( which is true ) and how the US supports and nurtures democracy, but it’s convenient how all of these countries on General Clark’s list have massive amounts of petroleum and gas, or are strategically situated for transport of said hydrocarbons.
The US has been meddling in Syria since 1949, because of petroleum. Most people are unaware of how pipeline politics have shaped events in Syria making the country a target for US aggression. But from 1949 until today, US intelligence services have tried repeatedly to topple the leader of the Syrian government in order to oversee and control a Trans-Arabian Pipeline “intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria.
In March 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to approve the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation for Al-Quwatli’s lack of enthusiasm for the U.S. pipeline, the CIA engineered a coup replacing al-Quwatli with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, four and a half months into his regime.
The crucial thing to understand is that Washington is fully committed to controlling critical resources in the Middle East as a way to contain China and maintain its increasingly tenuous grip on global power.
The US corporate media will mention none of this. It wasn’t a US/Israel regime change op utilizing jihadists but an organic uprising by Syrians desiring “freedom”. Meanwhile, its wild watching all the Western journalists and politicians celebrating an end to secularism in Syria. And the installation of an al Qaeda linked regime.
Of all the mainstream articles on the fall of the Syrian government, not one bothered to mention the fact that the Sunni militia that toppled Bashar al-Assad is currently on the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. Nor did they mention that the same jihadist group is on the United Nations list of terrorist organizations. Nor did they mention that the leader of the group—Abu Mohammad al-Jolani—has a $10 million bounty on his head offered by the US government.None of this information was reported to the public because the media does not want the American people to know that Washington just helped install a terrorist regime at the center of the Middle East. Instead CNN disingenuously reported, “How Syria’s rebel leader went from radical jihadist to a blazer-wearing revolutionary.”
How are we to believe that the same ideological groups who are head-chopping, women-abusing, minority-oppressing terrorists when they operate in US-occupied Iraq, are now “moderate”, “diversity-friendly rebels” when they operate next door in Syria?
While a succession of U.S. presidents have been committed to regime change in Syria, that long-held goal has been achieved in part through a sustained campaign of war propaganda aimed at “liberals”. A campaign that depicts the US as committed to promoting a liberal democratic order. That is why HTS is repackaging itself, ably assisted by the corporate media, as newly pragmatic and moderate. Truth is always the first casualty in war, or something, but the reality is that Syria was the victim of a U.S. regime change plot that began in 2011 and it was carried out by successive administrations with the help of collusion with the media. The U.S. had buy-in for whatever acts it wanted to carry out against Syria because of a sustained war propaganda effort. Remember the White Helmets? Or that time CNN Staged A Fake Interview With A Syrian Child For War Propaganda? The propaganda included newly created terms such as “barrel bombs” and a new epithet against anyone who spoke against their regime change project, who were labeled as “Assadists.”
I’m so old that I blogged about all of this in real time, but such is the united states of amnesia.
Of course, Israel is the clear beneficiary of the destruction of Syria, poised to starve and murder the remainder of the Palestinians trapped in Gaza while plotting the same for the residents of the West Bank. The 2001 Pentagon memo shown to Clark was, in fact, a reworking of a military blueprint for the Middle East that had been circulating in Washington for even longer – and had nothing to do with responding to 9/11 or terrorism. It was all about securing Israel’s place as a forward base for US interests in the oil-rich region. The champions of this idea were an increasingly influential group called the neoconservatives – or neocons for short.
By 1996, they had formalised their plan for “remaking” the Middle East into a document called A Clean Break. It proposed that Israel should tear up the Oslo Accords and any moves towards peacemaking with the Palestinians – the title’s “clean break” – and instead go on the offensive against its regional foes, with US backing.
As I’ve written before: it’s hard to tell if US foreign policy utilizes Israel or the Israeli Lobby controls the US, but Israel has certainly been taking full advantage of the destruction of Syria. HTS has been for years completely supported covertly, by Israel, which was outed for paying salaries to the extremists during the Syrian war, and famously helped rehabilitate Al-Qaeda fighters injured in battle.
Both Israel and the US utilize terrorist proxies. Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser, was clear who our allies were. In an email in late 2012, as Timber Sycamore was being put together, he wrote to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to avoid any confusion: “AQ [al-Qaeda] are on our side in Syria.”
An email sent to Clinton earlier, in spring 2012, had laid out the emerging thinking in the State Department. “US diplomats and Pentagon can start strengthening the opposition. It will take time,” the email asserted. “The payoff will be substantial…Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East… Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsors since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and missiles.” The chief beneficiary was made clear: “America can and should help them [Syrian rebels] – and by doing so help Israel.”
All of this is a reminder that the US empire and its proxies remain the greatest threat to world peace and development–a potent danger that should not be underestimated. For those in Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing and across all other capitals outside the West who lie to themselves about the nature of this war to avoid the discomfort of facing it – Syria is your ultimate future. There is no place for you at their table. You cannot compromise. You cannot infinitely buy time. You either successfully defend your nation together with your allies or you will be destroyed.
The Roman historian Tacitus was prescient: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
I knew that the deep state would not surrender the American empire without a fight and would go to extraordinary lengths to preserve it, but I underestimated their ruthlessness and depravity.
With their proxy war in Ukraine facing defeat and Israel’s failure to subdue Hezbollah they have turned to their old standby--terrorism. The U.S.’s aggressive neocon infused policies have again unleashed al-Qaeda linked rebels to wreak havoc in Syria.
To think that the all of these things are not connected is the height of naivety, in fact it’s clear that this is part of a complex interconnected operation . The US deep state’s tactics are not exactly new, and the Syrian gambit is similar to the reckless attack on Kursk. They are trying to divert Russia by focusing on Syria–overextending the Kremlin and relieving pressure on Ukraine–while attempting to curtail Iranian weapons supply to Hezbollah.
The CIA has renewed it’s dirty war with Sunni terrorist proxies, a reprise of Obama’s Timber Sycamore, in a renewed attempt to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The terrorist offensive is conveniently timed to coincide with the Lebanon “ceasefire,” and according to Yedioth Ahronoth, Israeli officials view the advance on Aleppo as an opportunity to weaken Syria. That is unsurprising as it’s widely believed that Israel, thwarted in its ground invasion of Lebanon, has circled back to its previous backup plan following its 2006 failure in Lebanon, which is to eliminate Iran’s ability to resupply Hezbollah via Syria.
The terrorist offensive is also a bid to distract and weaken Russia, who maintains several military bases in Syria as well as allying with the Bashar Assad government. The Sunni terrorists also received considerable support from Ukrainian special forces with a focus on drone warfare to target Russian and Syrian positions.
As you might expect, the US corporate media has turned on a dime, from enthusiastically supporting the “war on terror” attacks on al Qaeda, to cheerleading the new “war of terror” with al Qaeda as our allies. Even George Orwell would be impressed.
Author and analyst Max Blumenthal has done considerable research on the origins of these groups and presented his findings in a recent article titled The US has backed 21 of the 28 ‘crazy’ militias leading Turkey’s brutal invasion of northern Syria. Here’s a short blurb from his article: “Out of the 28 factions, 21 were previously supported by the United States,. In other words, virtually the entire apparatus of anti-Assad insurgents armed and equipped under the Obama administration has been repurposed by the Turkish military to serve as the spearhead of its brutal invasion of northern Syria. “
The Obama program to utilize terrorists to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar Assad, the before mentioned Timber Sycamore, was enthusiastically supported by the bi-partisan national security state including Senator John McCain and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When the later Sen. John McCain made his notorious surprise visit to the Turkish-Syrian border in May 2013, hoping to inspire a US military intervention, he was warmly welcomed by Salim Idriss, the then-leader of the US-backed Free Syrian Army, which was really al Qaeda of Syria.
Back in 2012 when Clinton was Secretary of State, she junketed to Istanbul to rally support for those very same militias during a “Friends of Syria” conference convened by Erdogan. She later remarked, “The hard men with the guns are going to be the more likely actors in any political transition than those on the outside just talking. And therefore we needed to figure out how we could support them on the ground, better equip them…”
To place this in historical perspective–the US utilizes terrorism, including the latest attacks in Syria, as a means to thwart the growing power and economic integration of BRICS members Russia, China, Iran, as well as any other countries who go against Washington and Wall Street’s policies. US foreign policy, implemented by the CIA, following the British MI6 model, utilizes terrorism to dissolve the social cohesion of a targeted country. Coupled with the sanctions and color change toolkit this has proven to be model for western governments to keep the jungle at bay.
Terrorism helps explain why the US and NATO downsized their conventional military capabilities. Why have your own soldiers fight and die when there’s a terrorist proxy available?
They say that as one gets older they become more conservative but that’s not my experience. I’ve become more radical and my views more subversive. I have lost any illusions about the world I inhabit. There is simply too much power riding on the continuation of the American empire for those in control to allow a multipolar world and if terrorism is required to maintain it then that’s exactly what they will do.
Update: The deep state might want to reappraise their embrace of terrorism in the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO. Two can play that game. Terrorism is a tactic of the weak and their are a lot of “soft targets” in the US.
We live in a interregnum, where everything, including reality itself, is in flux.
The paranoia and distrust of institutions that has taken hold in America is not a function of Donald Trump’s rancid populism no matter what the liberal, intellectual class may believe. The paranoia and distrust are a distillation of 40 plus years of neoliberalism, an economic and political project that funneled obscene wealth to the oligarchy as it impoverished the majority of Americans. The neoliberal consensus has for decades been utterly corporate, elitist, and narrow-minded to the exclusion of structural, nation-building policies that benefit working people, like Medicare for All or the return of American manufacturing from abroad. As a result the country is no longer capable of providing a good life for many of its citizens. In this light, we see a far more interesting picture emerge, where the rampant paranoia that is consuming the American body politic is the result of the capture and repurposing of the US government, combined with the extreme and accelerating decay of the American empire.
Trump is not going to “make America great again”. That ship has sailed. What needs to be done to make it happen are serious policies that our feral elite will hate. These, including real industrial policy and a collapse of asset prices and rent, plus increases in real wages, are anathema to America’s elites, and which, in any case, they are incompetent to implement. What we have instead is a corrupt political system and their resulting failure to deliver the kind of decent, improving living standards for its people that was once the basic idea of the American dream. I mentioned this before but it bears repeating. An April poll of voters aged eighteen to thirty by the Democratic-aligned Blueprint firm found that, in the words of its lead pollster, young voters look at US politics and “see a dying empire led by bad people”.
It’s hard to argue with that appraisal.
The elephant in the room is the American empire. The latest, “most important election ever” was characterized by the refusal of the candidates or the corporate media to even broach the subject, let alone suggest ways that the United States can rationally deal with the decline of its own empire. The reality is that American elites are engaged in a combination of denial and desperate pretense.
The recent authorization of missile strikes into Russia illuminate the risks those devoted to prolonging the imperium’s final phase will take in defense of the no-longer-defensible: All risks are acceptable as they cling to power. They will risk another world war; they will risk nuclear annihilation.
I never thought US leaders were capable of transitioning from a unipolar world to a multipolar one, just like I never thought they would be able to manage climate change. In fact it was never difficult to foresee that those planning and executing U.S. foreign policy, being second rate leaders influenced by a coterie of insane neocons, would prove incapable of an orderly transition to a multipolar world order. Increasing chaos and violence is baked in at this point, as recent events have made abundantly clear.
The loss of the American empire calls into question all of our political and economic actors. How does American corporate capitalism operate absent the US empire? I hate to quote Thomas Friedman but he has a point when he describes the US military as the backstop to American business. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, …”
Still, change is coming and it behooves us to imagine a future where the US is normal country instead of a global hegemon, circling the globe with military bases. And on that note, Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff had a fascinating discussion recently that deserves our attention.
RICHARD WOLFF: “Yes, I want to throw an idea out for you and for Michael to play with. And I’ll be blunt, so I won’t be able to develop the nuances of this. A very short time ago the head of Apple, Mr. Cook, went on a trip to China. He’s made many trips to China but more than one this year, but he recently made one. And it was crystal clear by the very warm reception he got, and by his own very enthusiastic, positive commentary on China, that – and here comes the jump – that there are sections of America’s most important, biggest businesses that do not want a war with China. They do not want this conflict. They have become the giant successes they have been because of what China enabled them to do. They know it. They don’t want to lose that. There is nothing to substitute for what they get out of China which, to be blunt, is cheap labor and the biggest expanding market on earth. To give those up is to risk their entire business operation.
Okay, now at some point – especially were Mr. Trump to win – these people are going to possibly begin to think like Michael just spoke. They’re going to say, These two parties are a disaster. They are involving us in one dead-end war, or conflict, after another. And while it may be good for the Military Industrial Complex, we are after all a bigger section of this economy than they are: we, the high tech industries; we, all the rest of the economy, other than the Military Industrial Complex.
At which point an immense conflict breaks out in the ranks of capitalists: Those who want to cut a deal with China and the BRICS work out how we live and let live with one another on this planet; who don’t want war and who don’t want nuclear war and who don’t want Jake Sullivan-type people playing around that problem – versus the Military Industrial Complex and those who are won over by them.”
Wolff makes an interesting argument that rings true. Average Americans have almost zero influence on policies so any change will be driven by elite rivalry and competition. Other capitalist sectors will come to see the military/industrial/complex MIC as detrimental to their own future success in the zero-sum competition going forward.
But, there are things behind things. The MIC has a powerful lock on American policy due to the undue influence of the neoconservatives who permeate every aspect of the national security state, and who remain blinded by the myth of American exceptionalism and its attendant ills to such a degree that they are unable to discern things as they really are.
For the second time in 8 years an outgoing Democratic administration has sabotaged Donald Trump and his desire for improved relations with Russia.
In 2016, President Obama played a central role in initiating Russia-gate, the nefarious scheme to portray Trump as a Russian agent. We know from emails released by WikiLeaks that early discussions regarding the Clinton campaign’s plot to associate Trump with Russia–what Clinton called the Swiftboat plan–were already initiated in February 2016. Over the following months, multiple aspects of the plan were assembled. These included the hiring of campaign operatives Fusion GPS, commissioning the Steele dossier, and composing a group of IT specialists who created a false data trail linking Putin and Trump. Whether Obama was involved with these efforts is unknown. The earliest documented date we have for Obama’s involvement in the scheme is July 28, 2016. On this day, Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, came to the Oval Office and briefed Obama on Clinton’s Russia-gate project. Thus, we can say for sure that it was on this day that Obama became aware that the allegations of Russian collusion was really a rat-fucking operation conceived by Hillary Clinton and her band of neocon war-hawks.
And now, President Biden, with his risky decision to allow long range ATACMS strikes into Russia, is attempting to lock Trump into an endless proxy war that has serious risk of a nuclear exchange.
President Joe Biden was too senile to stand for re-election, and was replaced on the Democratic ticket by Kamala Harris. But he’s still president until January 20, and he or the-powers-that-be directing him have decided to leave Trump with two hot wars to contend with. Trump was, in part, elected by the American people because he vowed to end the war in Ukraine. By taking this escalatory action two months before the end of his term, Biden could wreck any chance Trump might have to achieve peace.
This week the Ukrainian military launched multiple US-made ATACMS missiles at Russia’s Bryansk Region, some of which have been intercepted, the Russian Defense Ministry reported. Biden’s sudden reversal of policy represents a dramatic escalation in the war that will require a strong response from Moscow. Putin has repeatedly warned that firing missiles at targets located on Russian territory would trigger harsh retaliatory attacks not just on sites in Ukraine but also on those nations that are directly involved in the strikes, namely NATO and the United States.
If that wasn’t enough, after ‘allowing’ Ukraine to fire U.S. controlled ballistic missiles onto targets in Russia, the Biden administration has approved largely prohibited antipersonnel mines for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Biden’s perilous actions are pushing the US towards World War III. But what is equally shocking is that Biden has been informed by his top advisors that using the ATACMS would have no material impact on the outcome of the war which is already a lost cause. Russian troops are currently advancing at the fastest pace since the war began while Ukraine’s frontlines continue to collapse. The only effect the policy-change will have is to put US and NATO military assets and bases at greater risk and to hobble Trump’s attempt to forge a peace plan.
If Biden was too decrepit to be the Democrats’ candidate in 2024, why does he still have the ability to drag the US into a nuclear war? In fact, the only way that Biden is doing what he is doing is with the consent of senior national security and military leaders, the so-called deep state. Of course, with Biden’s advanced senility, the neocons who make up his foreign policy staff could be freelancing. The neocons are nothing if predictable. When one of their plans goes awry (which they invariably do) they simply double down.
For the last year perceptive military analysts have been pointing out that Russia continues to roll up the Ukrainian army and move to militarily subdue, to demilitarize and de-Nazify, Ukraine east of the Dnieper River, as well as the Black Sea coastal regions all the way to the Danube, including Transnistria. They will very likely also move to secure a demilitarized zone that reaches much further west than the Dnieper, and demand neutrality for whatever of Ukraine remains.
And when all of this becomes apparent the US and NATO will do something really stupid like shooting missiles into Russia.
Trump’s reelection has shattered the end of history narrative promulgated by Francis Fukuyama and the assorted coterie of neocons who plotted a perpetual American empire.
Former MI-6 military and foreign policy analyst, Alastair Crooke writes–“the U.S. election also, has been a referendum on the prevalent western intellectual mainstream. And that likely will be more decisive than the U.S. domestic vote – important though that is. The U.S. has shifted strategically away from the managerial techno-oligarchy that took its grip in the 1970s. Today’s shift is reflected across the U.S.
Back in 1970, Zbig Brzezinski (who was to become National Security Adviser to President Carter) wrote a book foreseeing the new era: What he then called ‘The Technetronic Era’, involved the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society … dominated by an élite, unrestrained by traditional values … [and practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen…[together with] manipulation of the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people… [would become the new norm].
Elsewhere, Brzezinski argued that the nation-state … has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. Brzezinski was plain wrong about the benefits of tech cosmopolitan governance. And he was decisively, and disastrously, wrong in the policy prescriptions that he adduced from the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 – that no country or group of countries would ever dare to stand up to U.S. power. Brzezinski argued in The Grand Chessboard that Russia would have no choice but to submit to the expansion of NATO, and to the geopolitical dictates of the U.S.”
Back to yours truly. It’s funny how reality always has the last word when it comes to ideologies. And, that’s a problem presently as the US establishment unmoors itself further from reality. Its priorities are so inverted, so obscene, that the most appropriate response is disbelief or ridicule. Since the end of the Cold War the US and western intellectuals have controlled the meta narrative–the “end of history”, etc. and it went rather well as long as they could control the narrative, but they can’t control the narrative anymore.
Hubris plays an oversized role in the notion of the end of history. The neocon intellectuals imagined a US that, like a colossus, stood astride the world. But, as I’ve discussed here, these same intellectuals were so blinded by their American exceptional ideology that they failed to understand that it’s not possible to maintain an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system. For the U.S. today faces its own internal structural contradictions owing to the off-shored manufacturing base. A recent report by the RAND Organization states starkly however, that the U.S. defense industrial base is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the U.S. and its allies and partners. A protracted conflict, especially in multiple theaters, would require much greater capacity. The U.S., the RAND appraisal continues, could in short order be drawn into a war across multiple theaters with peer and near-peer adversaries – and it could lose. It warns that the U.S. public has not internalized the costs of the U.S. losing its position as the world superpower.
Trump, almost certainly is a symptom of the neocon hubris. When governing institutions pass a critical threshold of unresponsiveness to the people, the reaction of the people is a wish for destroying the institutions even at the cost of social upheaval. All segments of the American and wider Western public are dissatisfied with their so-called representative government and its policies. What’s ironic is that America’s Cold War victory, used to justify its imperial dominance, was “bound to fail”, because the hyper-globalization of capital US neoliberals undertook detached the working- and middle-classes of the Western world from an economic and political regime which impoverished them.
We should not lament the collapse of the “rule-based international order” the neocons constructed post 1989. The unipolar era produced endless wars, regime-change efforts and a voracious financialization of the Western economies. The multipolar world we have entered has the potential to save the US from its own excesses. Beset by confident rivals abroad, and by the disenchantment of their own voters at home, America will once again have to learn restraint. The post-Cold War order ultimately proved disastrous for everyone except the oligarchy and their pet intellectuals.
Unfortunately there is no interest in the American Empire for “peace” because the need by the oligarchs is to maintain and enhance their control over their subject populations. How else are they going to maintain the rule of the corrupt and the ideology of hedonism and radical materialism? War is the answer to all their dreams and peace the major threat to the Imperial regime. Trump may not want any war, but the Deep State and the neocon intellectuals want war.
There was a clear winner in Tuesday’s presidential election. Billionaires won in a landslide.
No matter what the public wants and no matter the outcome of elections, the oligarchs almost always win. They get a neoliberal government that does little or nothing to address the crises those same oligarchs are profiting off of. They get a government in which “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy,” as summarized by Princeton researchers.
In other words: the country’s wealthiest are bankrolling the election, wielding political power and influence like never before. The U.S has strayed far beyond recognition from the Constitutional order crafted by the Framers and is corrupted systemically. The fact that billionaire dominate our political process proves it.
It’s not just the sheer scale of the political ad spend that’s worrying, it’s the disproportionate influence of billionaires. Eighteen percent of all political ad funding came straight from the pockets of a tiny handful of America’s mega-rich. In fact, according to USA Today, Harris had 83 billionaires supporting her—making up 6% of her campaign funds, according to Al Jazeera—while 52 backed Trump, but they were extremely generous donors, making up 34% of his total campaign fund.
Let’s not forget that Donald Trump is a billionaire, and Republicans have traditionally been the party of the wealthy.
And don’t get me started on the so-called “opposition” party–the Democrats–who used to represent working-class Americans but who now caters largely to the professional/managerial/caste, with some assorted “socially liberal” billionaires tossed in. But, of course, the Democrats will rewarm their familiar tale of victimhood, where they lost because Harris was a woman of color, or too progressive. It’s like they learned nothing from 2016. They’re similar to the French Bourbons. “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”
But, here’s the thing. Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black. She lost because the Democratic Party has turned its back on America’s working-class. At this point the modern Democratic Party needs to be burned to the ground and its ashes scattered to the wind. Furthermore there is a great demand for a non-billionaire party.
Kamala Harris lost because, if your political and media system is rigged by donors then it limits the choice to two neoconservative/neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline candidate has an edge. The United States political system keeps moving further to the right, pushed and pulled by both political parties. You can’t stop that relentless shift by voting for one of the two symptoms of your diseased political system.
I hate to break it to you but voting at the national level is largely useless and no one is coming to save us. We are going to have to rise up against the malignant system itself. We can’t afford to have any illusions.
camelotkidd 