The Nature of Foxes

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 07, 2022 5:08 pm

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U.S. military bases around the world. (Photo: Al Jazeera)

Mapping U.S. Imperialism
By The Mapping Project (Posted Jun 06, 2022)
The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.

–Hugo Chavez
The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.

–Xoài Pham
Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.

–Frantz Fanon
U.S. imperialism is the greatest threat to life on the planet, a force of ecological devastation and disaster impacting not only human beings, but also our non-human relatives. How can we organize to dismantle the vast and complicated network of U.S. imperialism which includes U.S. war and militarism, CIA intervention, U.S. weapons/technology/surveillance corporations, political and economic support for dictatorships, military juntas, death squads and U.S. trained global police forces favorable to U.S. geopolitical interests, U.S. imposed sanctions, so-called “humanitarian interventions,” genetically modified grassroots organizations, corporate media’s manipulation of spontaneous protest, and U.S. corporate sponsorship of political repression and regime change favorable to U.S. corporate interests?

This article deals with U.S. imperialism since World War 2. It is critical to acknowledge that U.S. imperialism emanates both ideologically and materially from the crime of colonialism on this continent which has killed over 100 million indigenous people and approximately 150 million African people over the past 500 years.

The exact death toll of U.S. imperialism is both staggering and impossible to know. What we do know is that since World War 2, U.S. imperialism has killed at least 36 million people globally in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, the Congo, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Chad, Libya, East Timor, Grenada, Honduras, Iran, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines, Sudan, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Somalia, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Palestine (see Appendix).

This list does not include other aspects of U.S. imperialist aggression which have had a devastating and lasting impact on communities worldwide, including torture, imprisonment, rape, and the ecological devastation wrought by the U.S. military through atomic bombs, toxic waste and untreated sewage dumping by over 750 military bases in over 80 countries. The U.S. Department of Defense consumes more petroleum than any institution in the world. In the year of 2017 alone, the U.S. military emitted 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, a carbon footprint greater than that of most nations worldwide. This list also does not include the impact of U.S. fossil fuel consumption and U.S. corporate fossil fuel extraction, fracking, agribusiness, mining, and mono-cropping, all of which are part and parcel of the extractive economy of U.S. imperialism.

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U.S. military bases around the world. (Photo: Al Jazeera)

One central mechanism of U.S. imperialism is “dollar hegemony” which forces countries around the world to conduct international trade in U.S. dollars. U.S. dollars are backed by U.S. bonds (instead of gold or industrial stocks) which means a country can only cash in one American IOU for another. When the U.S. offers military aid to friendly nations, this aid is circulated back to U.S. weapons corporations and returns to U.S. banks. In addition, U.S. dollars are also backed by U.S. bombs: any nation that threatens to nationalize resources or go off the dollar (i.e. Iraq or Libya) is threatened with a military invasion and/or a U.S. backed coup.

U.S. imperialism has also been built through “soft power” organizations like USAID, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization of American States (OAS). These nominally international bodies are practically unilateral in their subservience to the interests of the U.S. state and U.S. corporations. In the 1950s and ‘60s, USAID (and its precursor organizations) made “development aid” to Asian, African, and South American countries conditional on those countries’ legal formalization of capitalist property relations, and reorganization of their economies around homeownership debt. The goal was to enclose Indigenous land, and land shared through alternate economic systems, as a method of “combatting Communism with homeownership” and creating dependency and buy-in to U.S. capitalist hegemony (Nancy Kwak, A World of Homeowners). In order to retain access to desperately needed streams of resources (e.g. IMF “loans”), Global South governments are forced to accept resource-extraction by the U.S., while at the same time denying their own people popularly supported policies such as land reform, economic diversification, and food sovereignty. It is also important to note that Global South nations have never received reparations or compensation for the resources that have been stolen from them–this makes the idea of “loans” by global monetary institutions even more outrageous.

The U.S. also uses USAID and other similarly functioning international bodies to suppress and to undermine anti-imperialist struggle inside “friendly” countries. Starting in the 1960s, USAID funded police training programs across the globe under a counterinsurgency model, training foreign police as a “first line of defense against subversion and insurgency.” These USAID-funded police training programs involved surveillance and the creation of biometric databases to map entire populations, as well as programs of mass imprisonment, torture, and assassination. After experimenting with these methods in other countries, U.S. police departments integrated many of them into U.S. policing, especially the policing of BIPOC communities here (see our entry on the Boston Police Department). At the same time, the U.S. uses USAID and other soft power funding bodies to undermine revolutionary, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements, by funding “safe” reformist alternatives, including a global network of AFL-CIO managed “training centers” aimed at fostering a bureaucratic union culture similar to the one in the U.S., which keeps labor organizing loyal to capitalism and to U.S. global dominance. (See our entries on the AFL-CIO and the Harvard Trade Union Program.)

U.S. imperialism intentionally fosters divisions between different peoples and nations, offering (relative) rewards to those who choose to cooperate with U.S. dictates (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Colombia), while brutally punishing those who do not (e.g. Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela). In this way, U.S. imperialism creates material conditions in which peoples and governments face a choice: 1. accommodate the interests of U.S. Empire and allow the U.S. to develop your nation’s land and sovereign resources in ways which enrich the West; or, 2. attempt to use your land and your sovereign resources to meet the needs of your own people and suffer the brutality of U.S. economic and military violence.

The Harvard Kennedy School: Training Ground for U.S. Empire and the Security State

The Mapping Project set out to map local U.S. imperialist actors (involved in both material and ideological support for U.S. imperialism) on the land of Massachusett, Pawtucket, Naumkeag, and other tribal nations (Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding areas) and to analyze how these institutions interacted with other oppressive local and global institutions that are driving colonization of indigenous lands here and worldwide, local displacement/ethnic cleansing (“gentrification”), policing, and zionist imperialism.

A look at just one local institution on our map, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, demonstrates the level of ideological and material cooperation required for the machinery of U.S. imperialism to function. (All information outlined below is taken from The Mapping Project entries and links regarding the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Please see this link for hyperlinked source material.)

The Harvard Kennedy School of Government and its historical precursors have hosted some of the most infamous war criminals and architects of empire: Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Susan Rice (an HKS fellow), Madeleine Albright, James Baker, Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Larry Summers. HKS also currently hosts Ricardo Hausmann, founder and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab , the academic laboratory of the U.S. backed Venezuelan coup.

In How Harvard Rules, John Trumpbour documents the central role Harvard played in the establishment of the Cold War academic-military-industrial complex and U.S. imperialism post-WWII (How Harvard Rules, 51). Trumpbour highlights the role of the Harvard Kennedy School under Dean Graham Allison (1977-1989), in particular, recounting that Dean Allison ran an executive education program for Pentagon officials at Harvard Kennedy (HHR 68). Harvard Kennedy School’s support for the U.S. military and U.S. empire continues to this day. HKS states on its website:

Harvard Kennedy School, because of its mission to train public leaders and its depth of expertise in the study of defense and international security, has always had a particularly strong relationship with the U.S. Armed Forces. This relationship is mutually beneficial. The School has provided its expertise to branches of the U.S. military, and it has given military personnel (active and veteran) access to Harvard’s education and training.

The same webpage further notes that after the removal of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) from Harvard Kennedy School in 1969, “under the leadership of Harvard President Drew Faust, the ROTC program was reinstated in 2011, and the Kennedy School’s relationship with the military continues to grow more robust each year.”

In particular, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs provides broad support to the U.S. military and the objectives of U.S. empire. The Belfer Center is co-directed by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter (a war hawk who has advocated for a U.S. invasion of North Korea and U.S. military build ups against Russia and Iran) and former Pentagon Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach. Programs within HKS Belfer Center include the Center’s “Intelligence Program,” which boasts that it “acquaints students and Fellows with the intelligence community and its strengths and weaknesses for policy making,” further noting, “Discussions with active and retired intelligence practitioners, scholars of intelligence history, law, and other disciplines, help students and Fellows prepare to best use the information available through intelligence agencies.” Alongside HKS Belfer’s Intelligence Program, is the Belfer Center’s “Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship.” The Belfer Center claims that, under the direction of Belfer Center co-directors Ashton Carter and Eric Rosenbach, the Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship “educates the next generation of thought leaders in national and international intelligence.”

As noted above, the Harvard Kennedy School serves as an institutional training ground for future servants of U.S. empire and the U.S. national security state. HKS also maintains a close relationship with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As reported by Inside Higher Ed in their 2017 review of Spy Schools by Daniel Golden:

[Harvard Kennedy School] currently allows the agency [the CIA] to send officers to the midcareer program at the Kennedy School of Government while continuing to act undercover, with the school’s knowledge. When the officers apply–often with fudged credentials that are part of their CIA cover–the university doesn’t know they’re CIA agents, but once they’re in, Golden writes, Harvard allows them to tell the university that they’re undercover. Their fellow students, however–often high-profile or soon-to-be-high-profile actors in the world of international diplomacy–are kept in the dark.

Kenneth Moskow is one of a long line of CIA officers who have enrolled undercover at the Kennedy School, generally with Harvard’s knowledge and approval, gaining access to up-and-comers worldwide,” Golden writes. “For four decades the CIA and Harvard have concealed this practice, which raises larger questions about academic boundaries, the integrity of class discussions and student interactions, and whether an American university has a responsibility to accommodate U.S. intelligence.”

In addition to the CIA, HKS has direct relationships with the FBI, the U.S. Pentagon, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NERAC, and numerous branches of the U.S. Armed Forces:

*Chris Combs, a Senior Fellow with HKS’s Program on Crisis Leadership has held numerous positions within the FBI;
*Jeffrey A. Tricoli, who serves as Section Chief of the FBI’s Cyber Division since December 2016 (prior to which he held several other positions within the FBI) was a keynote speaker at “multiple sessions” of the HKS’s Cybersecurity Executive Education program;
*Jeff Fields, who is Fellow at both the Cyber Project and the Intelligence Project of HKS’s Belfer Center currently serves as a Supervisory Special Agent within the National Security Division of the FBI;
*HKS hosted former FBI director James Comey for a conversation with HKS Belfer Center’s Co-Director (and former Pentagon Chief of Staff) Eric Rosenbach in 2020;
*Government spending records show yearly tuition payments from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Homeland Security personnel attending special HKS seminars on Homeland Security under HKS’s Program on Crisis Leadership;
*Northeast Homeland Security Regional Advisory Council meeting minutes from February 2022 list “Edward Chao: Analyst, Harvard Kennedy School,” as a NERAC “Council Member”; and
*Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Air force have created multiple fellowships aimed at recruiting U.S. Air Force service members to pursue degrees at HKS. The Air Force’s CSAF Scholars Master Fellowship, for example, aims to “prepare mid-career, experienced professionals to return to the Air Force ready to assume significant leadership positions in an increasingly complex environment.” In 2016, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Doug Elmendorf welcomed Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James to Harvard Kennedy School, in a speech in which Elmendorf highlighted his satisfaction that the ROTC program, including Air Force ROTC, had been reinstated at Harvard (ROTC had been removed from campus following mass faculty protests in 1969).

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Harvard Kennedy School’s web.

The Harvard Kennedy School and the War Economy

HKS’s direct support of U.S. imperialism does not limit itself to ideological and educational support. It is deeply enmeshed in the war economy driven by the interests of the U.S. weapons industry.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, L3 Harris, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman are global corporations who supply the United States government with broad scale military weaponry and war and surveillance technologies. All these companies have corporate leadership who are either alumni of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (HKS), who are currently contributing to HKS as lecturers/professors, and/or who have held leadership positions in U.S. federal government.

Lockheed Martin Vice President for Corporate Business Development Leo Mackay is a Harvard Kennedy School alumnus (MPP ’91), was a Fellow in the HKS Belfer Center International Security Program (1991-92) and served as the “military assistant” to then U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Ashton Carter, who would soon go on to become co-director of the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. Following this stint at the U.S. Pentagon, Mackay landed in the U.S. weapons industry at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin Vice President Marcel Lettre is an HKS alumni and prior to joining Lockheed Martin, Lettre spent eight years in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The U.S. DoD has dished out a whopping $540.82 billion to date in contracts with Lockheed Martin for the provision of products and services to the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and other branches of the U.S. military. Lockheed Martin Board of Directors member Jeh Johnson has lectured at Harvard Kennedy School and is the former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for carrying out the U.S. federal government’s regime of tracking, detentions, and deportations of Black and Brown migrants. (Retired) General Joseph F. Dunford is currently a member of two Lockheed Martin Board of Director Committees and a Senior Fellow with HKS’s Belfer Center. Dunford was a U.S. military leader, serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Commander of all U.S. and NATO Forces in Afghanistan. Dunford also serves on the board of the Atlantic Council, itself a cutout organization of NATO and the U.S. security state which crassly promotes the interests of U.S. empire. Mackay, Lettre, Johnson, and Dunford’s respective career trajectories provide an emblematic illustration of the grotesque revolving door which exists between elite institutions of knowledge production like the Harvard Kennedy School, the U.S. security state (which feeds its people into those elite institutions and vice versa), and the U.S. weapons industry (which seeks business from the U.S. security state).

Similar revolving door phenomena are notable among the Harvard Kennedy School and Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman. HKS Professor Meghan O’Sullivan currently serves on the board of Massachusetts-based weapons manufacturer Raytheon. O’Sullivan is also deeply enmeshed within America’s security state, currently sitting on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations and has served as “special assistant” to President George W. Bush (2004-07) where she was “Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan,” helping oversee the U.S. invasions and occupations of these nations during the so-called “War on Terror.” O’Sullivan has openly attempted to leverage her position as Harvard Kennedy School to funnel U.S. state dollars into Raytheon: In April 2021, O’Sullivan penned an article in the Washington Post entitled “It’s Wrong to Pull Troops Out of Afghanistan. But We Can Minimize the Damage.” As reported in the Harvard Crimson, O’Sullivan’s author bio in this article highlighted her position as a faculty member of Harvard Kennedy (with the perceived “expertise” affiliation with HKS grants) but failed to acknowledge her position on the Board of Raytheon, a company which had “a $145 million contract to train Afghan Air Force pilots and is a major supplier of weapons to the U.S. military.” Donn Yates who works in Domestic and International Business Development at Boeing’s T-7A Redhawk Program was a National Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2015-16. Don Yates also spent 23 years in the U.S. Air Force. Former Northrop Grumman Director for Strategy and Global Relations John Johns is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy’s National and International Security Program. Johns also spent “seven years as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Maintenance establishing policy for, and leading oversight of the Department’s annual $80B weapon system maintenance program and deployed twice in support of security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The largest U.S. oil firms are also closely interlocked with these top weapons companies, which have also diversified their technological production for the security industry–providing services for pipeline and energy facility security, as well as border security. This means that the same companies are profiting at every stage in the cycle of climate devastation: they profit from wars for extraction; from extraction; and from the militarized policing of people forced to migrate by climate disaster. Exxon Mobil (the 4th largest fossil fuel firm) contracts with General Dynamics, L3 Harris, and Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin, the top weapons company in the world, shares board members with Chevron, and other global fossil fuel companies. (See Global Climate Wall: How the world’s wealthiest nations prioritise borders over climate action.)

The Harvard Kennedy School and U.S. Support for Israel

U.S. imperialist interests in West Asia are directly tied to U.S. support of Israel. This support is not only expressed through tax dollars but through ideological and diplomatic support for Israel and advocacy for regional normalization with Israel.

Harvard Kennedy School is home to the Wexner Foundation. Through its “Israel Fellowship,” The Wexner Foundation awards ten scholarships annually to “outstanding public sector directors and leaders from Israel,” helping these individuals to pursue a Master’s in Public Administration at the Kennedy School. Past Wexner fellows include more than 25 Israeli generals and other high-ranking military and police officials. Among them is the Israeli Defense Force’s current chief of general staff, Aviv Kochavi, who is directly responsible for the bombardment of Gaza in May 2021. Kochavi also is believed to be one of the 200 to 300 Israeli officials identified by Tel Aviv as likely to be indicted by the International Criminal Court’s probe into alleged Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza in 2014. The Wexner Foundation also paid former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak–himself accused of war crimes in connection with Israel’s 2009 Operation Cast Lead that killed over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza–$2.3 million for two studies, one of which he did not complete.

HKS’s Belfer Center has hosted Israeli generals, politicians, and other officials to give talks at Harvard Kennedy School. Ehud Barak, mentioned above, was himself a “Belfer fellow” at HKS in 2016. The Belfer Center also hosts crassly pro-Israel events for HKS students, such as: The Abraham Accords – A conversation on the historic normalization of relations between the UAE, Bahrain and Israel,” “A Discussion with Former Mossad Director Tamir Pardo,” “The Future of Modern Warfare” (which Belfer describes as “a lunch seminar with Yair Golan, former Deputy Chief of the General Staff for the Israel Defense Forces”), and “The Future of Israel’s National Security.”

As of 2022, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center is hosting former Israel military general and war criminal Amos Yadlin as a Senior Fellow at the Belfer’s Middle East Initiative. Furthermore, HKS is allowing Yadlin to lead a weekly study group of HKS students entitled “Israeli National Security in a Shifting Middle East: Historical and Strategic Perspectives for an Uncertain Future.” Harvard University students wrote an open letter demanding HKS “sever all association with Amos Yadlin and immediately suspend his study group.” Yadlin had defended Israel’s assassination policy through which the Israeli state has extrajudicially killed hundreds of Palestinians since 2000, writing that the “the laws and ethics of conventional war did not apply” vis-á-vis Palestinians under zionist occupation.

Harvard Kennedy School also plays host to the Harvard Kennedy School Israel Caucus. The HKS Israel Caucus coordinates “heavily subsidized” trips to Israel for 50 HKS students annually. According to HKS Israel Caucus’s website, students who attend these trips “meet the leading decision makers and influencers in Israeli politics, regional security and intelligence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, [and] the next big Tech companies.” The HKS Israel Caucus also regularly hosts events which celebrate “Israel’s culture and history.” Like the trips to Israel they coordinate, HKS Israel Caucus events consistently whitewash over the reality of Israel’s colonial war against the Palestinian people through normalizing land theft, forced displacement, and resource theft.

Harvard Kennedy School also has numerous ties to local pro-Israel organizations: the ADL, the JCRC, and CJP.

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Support for Saudi Arabia

In 2017, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center announced the launch of “The Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security,” which Belfer stated was “made possible through a gift from HRH Prince Turki bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.” Through this project, Harvard Kennedy School and the HKS Belfer Center have hosted numerous events at HKS which have promoted Saudi Arabia as a liberalizing and positive force for security and stability in the region, whitewashing over the realities of the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed campaign of airstrikes and blockade against Yemen which has precipitated conditions of mass starvation and an epidemic of cholera amongst the Yemeni people.

The Belfer Center’s Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security further normalizes and whitewashes Saudi Arabia’s crimes through its “HKS Student Delegation to Saudi Arabia.” This delegation brings 11 Harvard Kennedy School students annually on two-week trips to Saudi Arabia, where students “exchange research, engage in cultural dialogue, and witness the changes going on in the Kingdom firsthand.” Not unlike the student trips to Israel Harvard Kennedy School’s Israel Caucus coordinates, these trips to Saudi Arabia present HKS students with a crassly propagandized impression of Saudi Arabia, shoring up support for the “Kingdom” amongst the future leaders of the U.S. security state which HKS seeks to nurture.

Finding Our Mission

The vast network outlined above between the Harvard Kennedy School, the U.S. federal government, the U.S. Armed Forces, and the U.S. weapons industry constitutes only a small portion of what is known about HKS and its role in U.S. imperialism, but it is enough.

The Mapping Project demonstrates that the Harvard Kennedy School of Government is a nexus of U.S. imperialist planning and cooperation, with an address. The Mapping Project also links HKS to harms locally, including, but not limited to colonialism, violence against migrants, ethnic cleansing/displacement of Black and Brown Boston area residents from their communities (“gentrification”), health harm, policing, the prison-industrial complex, zionism, and surveillance. The Harvard Kennedy School’s super-oppressor status – the sheer number of separate communities feeling its global impact in their daily lives through these multiple and various mechanisms of oppression and harm – as it turns out, is its greatest weakness.

A movement that can identify super-oppressors like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government can use this information to identify strategic vulnerabilities of key hubs of power and effectively organize different communities towards common purpose. This is what the Mapping Project aims to do–to move away from traditionally siloed work towards coordination across communities and struggles in order to build strategic oppositional community power.

Appendix: The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2

A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people
Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people
Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people
Cambodia: 2-3 million people
Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured
Chile: 10,000 people (the U.S. sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)
Colombia: 60,000 people
Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by U.S. corporations and the U.S. sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)
Croatia: 15,000 people
Cuba: 1,800 people
Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people
East Timor: 200,000 people
El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)
Greece: More than 50,000 people
Grenada: 277 people
Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)
Haiti: 100,000 people
Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)
Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people
Iran: 262,000 people
Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War
Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people
Korea: 5 million people
Kosovo: 500 to 5,000
Laos: 50,000 people
Libya: at least 2500 people
Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (U.S. backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)
Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. U.S. govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)
Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people
Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence
Panama: between 500 and 4000 people
Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared
Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people
Somalia: at least 2,000 people
Sudan: 2 million people
Syria: at least 350,000 people
Vietnam: 3 million people
Yemen: over 377,000 people
Yugoslavia: 107,000 people

https://mronline.org/2022/06/06/mapping ... perialism/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 02, 2022 4:32 pm

Mike Pompeo's Revealing Hudson Institute Speech
Caitlin Johnstone
Jun 30

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Former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo gave a speech at the Hudson Institute last week that's probably worth taking a look at just because of how much it reveals about the nature of the US empire and the corrupt institutions which influence its policies.

Pompeo is serving as a "Distinguished Fellow" at the Hudson Institute while he waits for the revolving door of the DC swamp to rotate him back into a federal government position. The Hudson Institute is a neoconservative think tank which has a high degree of overlap with the infamous Project for the New American Century and its lineup of Iraq war architects, and spends a lot of its time manufacturing Beltway support for hawkish agendas against Iran. It was founded in 1961 with the help of a cold warrior named Herman Kahn, whose enthusiastic support for the idea that the US can win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was reportedly an inspiration for the movie Dr Strangelove.

A think tank is an institution where academics are paid by the worst people in the world to come up with explanations for why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid, which are then pitched at key points of influence in the media and the government. "Think tank" is a good and accurate label for these institutions, because they are dedicated to controlling what people think, and because they are artificial enclosures for slimy creatures.


Pompeo's speech is one long rimjob for the military-industrial complex which indirectly employs him. He repeatedly sings the praises of the weapons that are being poured into Ukraine, two of them by name: the Patriot missile built by Raytheon and the Javelin missile built jointly by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, both of whom happen to be major funders of the Hudson Institute. He repeatedly decries the "disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan," and excoriates the Biden administration for failing to control the world's fossil fuel resources aggressively enough in its efforts to "prostrate itself to radicals.”

Pompeo, easily ranked among the most fanatical imperialists on the entire planet, hilariously says that “China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a form of imperialism.” He decries a "genocide" in Xinjiang and repeatedly implies that China deliberately unleashed Covid-19 upon the world, calling it “the global pandemic induced by China.” He repeatedly claims that Vladimir Putin is trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union.

Along with praise for NATO and for the various anti-China alliances in the Indo-Pacific, Pompeo names "Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan" as "the three lighthouses for liberty" which those alliances must work to support militarily. You will notice that those three "lighthouses" just so happen to be the hottest points of geostrategic conflict with the top three opponents of the US empire: Russia, Iran, and China.

But there are a couple of things Pompeo says which have some real meat on them.

“By aiding Ukraine, we undermined the creation of a Russian-Chinese axis bent on exerting military and economic hegemony in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East," Pompeo says.

“We must prevent the formation of a Pan-Eurasian colossus incorporating Russia, but led by China," he later adds. "To do that, we have to strengthen NATO, and we see that nothing hinders Finland and Sweden’s entry into that organization.”

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Hudson Institute
@HudsonInstitute
To stop a "Pan-Eurasian colossus" from forming, @mikepompeo stresses the importance of #Finland and #Sweden joining @NATO as well as #Russia's resulting increase in military capability if they are denied entry.
June 29th 2022

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That's all the major international news stories of today are ultimately about, right there. Underlying all the smaller news stories about conflicts with nations like Russia, China and Iran, there's one continuous story about the US power alliance trying to secure planetary domination by relentlessly working to subvert any nation which refuses to align with it, and about the nations who oppose that campaign working against it with steadily increasing intimacy.

This is all the Russia hysteria from 2016 onward has been about. This is all the phony, hypocritical hand-wringing about Taiwan, Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been about. This is all the staged histrionics about human rights in Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba have been about. It's all been about manufacturing international consent for an increasingly dangerous campaign to secure unipolar global hegemony at any cost.

It's worth calling this to mind, as NATO for the first time designates China a threat due to its alignment with Russia and as NATO's secretary-general admits that NATO has been preparing for a conflict with Russia since 2014. It is worth calling to mind the fact that the US has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any rival superpower to deny any serious challenge to its planetary domination. It is worth calling to mind that in 1997 the precursor to the US Space Force committed to working toward "full spectrum dominance," meaning military control over land, sea, air, and space.

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Benjamin Norton
@BenjaminNorton
US unipolar hegemony.

They are right that China challenges NATO interests: the NATO cartel's existential goal of enforcing a US global dictatorship, one that imposes neoliberalism on the planet, destroying any country that proposes a state-led, people-centered economic model
Carl Zha @CarlZha

NATO says China challenges NATO interests and values. Pray tell, what are those NATO interests and values?
June 30th 2022

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People like to talk about secret conspiracies by shadowy cabals to establish a one-world government, but what is by far the most tangible and imminent global domination agenda has been orchestrated right out in the open. The US government has long sought to unite the world under a single power structure, no matter how much violence and devastation it needs to inflict upon humanity and no matter how much world-threatening nuclear brinkmanship it needs to engage in to do so.

This is the US empire which corrupt psychopaths like Mike Pompeo support. A power structure which wages nonstop wars in order to keep the peace, which continually oppresses populations around the world in order to protect freedom, and which risks nuclear war with increasingly reckless aggression to in order save the world.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p ... 6645fd708c

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USING HUNGER AS A WEAPON OF WAR IS A WESTERN TACTIC
Jun 28, 2022 , 6:20 p.m.

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Russia is not responsible for the food crisis (Photo: Getty Images)

A serious food crisis is looming, especially in the Global South. This is the warning that various international organizations and forums have issued in recent months. The leaders of the European Union and the United States have also said so.

The most recent time such a situation was discussed was at the "United for Global Food Security" Ministerial Conference, held on June 24 in Berlin, Germany. According to the United Nations (UN) World Food Program, the number of people in the world experiencing acute food insecurity has more than doubled to 276 million people. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in his video message to conference participants that "there is a real risk of famine in many places in 2022. And 2023 could be even worse."

Although in principle the concern seems legitimate, when investigating what is pointed out as the cause of the crisis, the reasons for so much interest in addressing the issue appear: the West wants to leave Russia as the culprit of the global food crisis. So did Western foreign ministers during the conference in Berlin.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in her opening speech that the launch of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine has negatively affected the food situation in the world. "Russia is using hunger as a weapon and is deliberately using hunger as a weapon of war and is holding the whole world hostage, " Ella Baerbock said.
French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna added that the problem also lies in the fact that Russia destroyed grain storage and supply infrastructure during the conflict, and "due to the blockade of ports, further damage is expected."
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said it was "Russia's war on Ukraine," not unilateral coercive measures, that will add another 40 to 50 million more people to the ranks of world hunger. . "There is no other reason than Russia's blockade of Ukraine and Russia's refusal in many cases to export its own grain for political reasons," Blinken said.
Russia has been responsible for denying the accusations on several occasions. The country's government maintains that the world food crisis occurred long before the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, and among the factors that have exacerbated the problem are Western "sanctions", which have disrupted food supplies.

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The food crisis mainly affects poor countries, but it is not exclusive to them. American and European citizens are already feeling the consequences with food shortages and price increases (Photo: Antena 3)

The Russian approach to the situation of hunger in the world coincides with what the researcher Clara Sánchez has been saying in her research and that we have published here . She also highlights the factor of the energy crisis, another trigger for the rise in international food prices.

For example, in 2021 the price of oil had an increase of 68%, this translated into increased costs of fuel, fertilizers and other inputs that are necessary for world agricultural production, which is based on a model highly dependent on hydrocarbons.

Sánchez recently wrote an article in which he shows that the food crisis is being used as an instrument of pressure against Russia, to give greater freedom to NATO actions in the context of the events in Ukraine and the Donbass region. .

SANCTIONS DO AFFECT
An important fact that Clara Sánchez points out at the beginning of her investigation is that 75% of the coercive measures of the United States against Russia were imposed after the military operation in Ukraine began.

The western narrative denies that blocking Moscow in the economic, commercial and financial spheres influences the aggravation of the food crisis. Sánchez quotes Josep Borrell, diplomatic representative of the European Union, who says that the measures taken by European countries "do not prohibit the export of food and fertilizers", therefore, he does not conceive that "millions of tons of wheat continue to be blocked in Ukraine while in the rest of the world people are starving. A real war crime."

Borrell's statements contrast with those of the UN Secretary General, who warns that "there will be no effective solution without reintegrating Ukraine's production as well as food and fertilizers from Russia." Why does he mention Russia, if supposedly the "sanctions" do not affect the food sector? The answer, Sánchez writes, is revealed by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US ambassador to the UN. He says that although grains and fertilizers are not under US sanctions, companies are "a little nervous" about possible retaliation for exporting Russian inputs, so the US government is drawing up "safety letters" to encourage them to keep trading.

"In other words, it is recognized that the 'sanctions' are affecting the export of food and fertilizers from Russia, impacting several countries," writes Sánchez.

IMPORTANCE OF RUSSIA IN GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations ( FAO ), Russia is the world's largest exporter of wheat, while Ukraine ranks fifth. Together, they account for 14% of the world's global wheat supply and contribute significant output in other cereals, such as barley and maize. It also highlights that kyiv is the main exporter of sunflower oil and Russia of fertilizers.

These facts work very well to feed the story that holds Moscow exclusively responsible for the food crisis, within the framework of the war. Clara Sánchez explains that, in order to disarm the falsehoods that accompany the Western narrative, it is necessary to separately examine the data on the production of the countries and also see where exports are going.

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Aish Baladi, traditional bread in Egypt. Wheat is a fundamental food in many societies. (Photo: Nariman El-Mofty/Associated Press)

The first differentiation made by Clara Sánchez is with respect to cultivated land. "Russia cultivates more than 121 million hectares every year, 70 percent more than Ukraine, where 32 million hectares are planted annually," she says, adding that Russia's main crop is wheat. 68% of the production of this food is intended for human consumption, which shows its importance in food security in the world.

As mentioned above, Moscow and Ukraine together produce 14% of the world's wheat, but the former's share (10%) is much more than double that of the latter (4%).

Other data testifies to the weight of Russia on Ukraine regarding wheat:

*Russia ranks third in world wheat production, behind China and India, but is first in export volumes.
*In 2021, 192 million metric tons of wheat were exported, of which 33 million were of Russian production. For its part, Ukraine produced a total of 32 million tons of wheat and only exported half.

The FAO says that 27% of the wheat trade comes from Russia and Ukraine, but around 18% goes to Russia alone.
With respect to other cereals produced by both countries, corn cultivation stands out. Ukraine produces 53 million metric tons of cereals, which includes barley, sorghum, oats, millet and rye, but corn accounts for 78% of production. For its part, Russia produces 40 million tons of cereals and 37% corresponds to corn.

The joint contribution of the two countries is less than that of wheat. Both account for 5% of the total production of corn in the world, however, Ukraine allocates much more of its production for export than Russia. kyiv exports half of its production and Russia only 2%.

The point here is that, unlike wheat, maize is not a food that is produced primarily for human consumption, paradoxical as it sounds. Only 15% of the production of this item is intended to feed people. The rest is divided into animal fodder (58%) and industrial uses (27%), such as the production of biofuels.

Although the corn that feeds animals translates into protein for people, not all of the world's population has access to meat, much less the strata in a situation of poverty. China, with the highest concentration of population, demands 26% of the total consumption of meat, the United States and the European Union occupy the second and third place, and together they demand 22%, Brazil occupies the fourth place with 6% of the demand and Russia follows with 3%. None of the countries with critical food situations (Afghanistan, Yemen, Haiti, Iraq, Syria, etc.) appear at the top of the list.

Regarding biofuels, Sánchez says that the United States produces 48% of ethanol globally and does so mostly based on corn processing, while the European Union is the largest importer of ethanol in the world, with 16% followed by Canada (14%) and the United States (13%). The countries of the European Union also lead the production of biodiesel, a fuel made from vegetable oils. The raw materials used for this purpose, sunflower seed and rapeseed, are mostly supplied by Ukraine . So while there is a shortage and rationing of cooking oil, millions of tons are burned in vehicles.

Based on the data presented, Sánchez indicates that "Russia and Ukraine are indeed important food producers and exporters, but the world's most serious food crisis is not at the door just because Ukraine's production is lacking."

The opposite is the case with the embargo against Russia, because in addition to growing a fundamental food for human consumption in many of the countries of the Global South, it produces "11% of the world's ammonia, 7% of the phosphate rock and 20% of the world potassium," writes Sánchez. So Russia is also, together with the sanctioned Belarus , responsible for the production of most of the fertilizers that are necessary for plant production for human consumption.

CONCERN ABOUT THE UKRAINIAN GRAIN BUSINESS

Many corporate actors related to the grain market come together in Ukraine and none of them have an interest in the food security of the planet, as Clara Sánchez points out.

kyiv-based Kernel is the company that dominates Ukrainian grain exports. In the first quarter of the 2021-2022 season, it controlled 16% of the total corn exported in the country. It also controls 21% of the total production of sunflower oil and owns the largest land bank in the country, with 514 thousand hectares.

It has the support of powerful US shareholders, including Bill Gates' Cascade Investment LLC and The Vanguard Group Inc, "the world's second-largest provider of exchange-traded funds after BlackRock," says Sánchez.

Other large corporations with a presence in the Ukrainian grain trade are: "Cargill (USA), Louis Dreyfus Company-LDC (France), Archer Daniels Midland Company-ADM (USA) and Bunge (currently based in the United States) which, in addition, is the second largest sunflower processor and exporter in Ukraine." The four make up the ABCD conglomerate, which controls most of the international trade in cereals and grains, and has significant influence over the determination of international food prices.

These large grain traders quickly joined the blockade actions against Russia, reducing or suspending their activities in the country.

Sánchez also mentions Nibulón, a landowner company that differs from the rest by being the only one that has its own river fleet in Ukraine, the largest and most modern, with 80 vessels. In 2021, its most successful year, Nibulon shipped 6 million tons of grain to 38 countries. 67% of all its exports were made from the Mikolaiv Sea Trade Port .

Mikolaiv is a Ukrainian port city that is located on the pass to Odessa, the country's largest port. Nibulon and Bunge operate in the first, and Kernel Cargill and LDC operate in the second. Another propaganda tool used in the rhetoric of the blockade of Ukraine, in the context of a major world food crisis, an instrument of war to contain the Russian advance in these regions

When President Zelensky returned from his visit to the Black Sea region, where the cities are, he said: "We will not give the south to anyone, we will return everything that is ours, and the sea will be Ukrainian and safe." The "Ukrainian sea" of which he speaks privileges the economic activity of agribusiness corporations that do not provide any help to the populations that suffer from hunger.

It must be emphasized, since one of the propaganda resources to justify the accusations against Russia for the food crisis is the blockade of the seaports in Ukraine, for which Russia is not to blame either; the Black Sea ports were mined by the Ukrainians themselves. We just have to clear the waters and resume grain exports. "We are not going to take advantage of the demining situation to, say, carry out some kind of attack from the sea, " President Vladimir Putin once said .

RUSSIA IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FOOD CRISIS

As we have verified with the data shared by Clara Sánchez, the grains that Ukraine stops delivering due to hostilities are not decisive for the world market, so the delay in exports can hardly be described as "catastrophic" for food security, much less when a good part is used for purposes other than human consumption.

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(Photo: Maxim Zakharov/RIA Novosti)

Moscow does not prevent the export of grain from Ukraine and, on the contrary, is trying to contribute to food security in the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian troops, just as it does in the Donbass region. For example, support is being provided to farmers, infrastructure is being restored and seeds are being supplied.

In what way is Russia involved in the food crisis? For the indirect sanctions against the Russian agricultural sector. Western banking, insurance and commercial institutions, intimidated by the restrictions, refuse to cooperate with the Eurasian country and this has repercussions in vulnerable countries that depend on the export of food and fertilizer produced in Russia.

The West, and its agro-industrial model, is the main culprit that the food situation in the world could worsen, and the only thing it is doing is evading its responsibility by blaming Russia.

https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... occidental

Google Translator

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German political scientist Ulrich Brand. Photo by Lisa Bolyos/Wikimedia Commons.
Transcending the ‘imperial mode of living’
Originally published: Canadian Dimension on June 24, 2022 by James Wilt (more by Canadian Dimension) | (Posted Jun 28, 2022)
Imperialism, Inequality, Marxism, StrategyGlobalInterview
In a giant overcorrection from the anti-consumerism era of No Logo and Adbusters, much of the “climate left” in the Global North now tends to dismiss any critique of resource-intensive consumption—driving and flying, factory farmed meat, smartphones—as reactionary, if not even “Thatcherite” or “Malthusian.” Focusing on consumption, the argument goes, distracts from immense capitalist power and profits, blaming the increasingly immiserated working class for conditions that we have no control over. This conclusion has been widely memeified: think of “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” the “Mister Gotcha” comic, or the (misleading) claim that a mere 100 corporations are “responsible” for 71 percent of emissions.

There’s some merit to this pushback, of course. Individualizing climate change and other environmental crises is a key strategy of capital, with the “carbon footprint” first promoted and popularized by BP as a way to diffuse the responsibility of fossil fuel producers. This reality seems only further confirmed every time we learn of a new situation of extreme capitalist waste, such as airlines running thousands of “ghost flights” during the pandemic to maintain airport slots, farmers dumping thousands of gallons of milk, or Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock. Capital is to blame, of course.

But when thinking about any kind of rapid and globally just transition, there’s an urgent need to assess the profound imbrication of resource-intensive consumption at the subjective level of conscious and unconscious desires. Countless things that are popularly understood and strived for as key components of a “good life” fundamentally depend on the ever-deepening immiseration of poor, colonized, and racialized peoples, especially in the Global South. Continued access to these material benefits has helped shore up capitalism and stabilize or displace its many crises and contradictions—until very recently, that is—with an “unstable equilibrium of compromise” enrolling subjects as active participants in its maintenance.

One of the most vital recent texts exploring this trend is The Imperial Mode of Living by German scholars Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen. In contrast to the overly simplistic notion that capital unilaterally imposes consumption upon us, Brand and Wissen emphasize a dialectical analysis in which capitalist domination “draws on the wishes and desires of the populace … becomes a part of individual identity, shapes it, and thereby becomes all the more effective.” Canadian Dimensionspoke with Brand, professor for international politics at the University of Vienna, about the imperial mode of living, the dynamic nature of hegemony, and potential alternatives.

Canadian Dimension (CD): What is the imperial mode of living? Why is it a mode of living, rather than a lifestyle or way of life?

| Book | MR OnlineUlrich Brand(UB): The context when we started to work on it was the economic crisis of 2007-2008, where the climate crisis and the ecological crisis had a lot of attention but the specific crisis policies were old-school: supporting the car industry and not really pushing the mobility transition. We asked ourselves: why is the continuity so strong?

We said, OK, there are obviously structures coming from critical theory and Marxism. It’s the mode of production. But what is the other side of the coin? There, we proposed the term “imperial mode of living” or “mode of living” in the sense that it has its own dynamics. We have to think about the mode of production, of course, which is class-based, power-based, globalization-oriented. But the mode of living is that people make sense or have material practices as everyday life.

It’s not a thing of choice, like “I want to have this living room or that car.” But people, with all their differences, are inscribed in a mode of living and mode of production that constantly refers to an elsewhere: to cheap labour and nature. The products and the commodities that people are consuming don’t indicate the conditions under which they were produced. In the smartphone, in the car, in the plane, in the industrially produced food there is this elsewhere—this exploitative relationship—inscribed.

CD: A central claim about the imperial mode of living is that it is exclusive, with contradictions only heightening as more people fight for access to it or refuse to continue bearing its costs. What is it about the imperial mode of living that makes it inherently exclusive and something that can’t be universalized?

UB: “Everyday life” is not a moralizing category, it’s a structural category. To understand this deeply embedded, unsustainable mode of living and mode of production, we necessarily need the other side of the coin: we need the destruction of land to exploit oil and gas—and now even worse with fracking. We need the workers in Bangladesh for the production of textiles. We need the workers in China for the production of cellphones. Against the economic orthodoxy that if there are high enough growth rates, there will be the famous trickle down effect and everybody will be better off along income and class dimensions, we argue, no: we need this other side of the coin.

However, coming from critical theory, we want to highlight dialectical thinking. It’s on the one hand exclusive but it’s also attractive. Even the exploited people, when they have a higher income and better status: they want to be integrated. They want to live the imperial mode of living. We see this with this enormous growth of meat consumption and cars in China. It’s attractive and exclusive. We want to understand and underline this and the invisibility of the preconditions: how nature is appropriated and destroyed, how other people and their workforce is appropriated.

CD: How are the benefits of the imperial mode of living further differentiated through various intersections of gender, race, and socioeconomic status?

UB: This is a very important point. We argue as a structural category, everybody is pulled into the imperial mode of living. We need to live the imperial mode of living. But there are differences because of exploitation within the Global North: there are migrant workers and poor working conditions for many, many people.

These inequalities exist mainly along income: it’s not so much the “ecological consciousness” but the income that produces the so-called ecological footprint or how we are integrated in the imperial mode of living. It’s also public infrastructure that’s produced with materials from the Global South. So we argue that it depends along race and gender because it’s part of the social division of labour. People of colour are usually more exploited: they have fewer chances for a career and good education so they’re stuck to a position within the social division of labour and usually gain less. It’s the same with the gender division of labour: there is a gender pay gap and very different opportunities for careers.

Besides the socialization and social division of labour, we also have consumption patterns that are very different. For example: the use of cars and who gets the larger car, in what Cara Daggett calls “petro-masculinity.” Even with electric cars: the huge Tesla car, almost looking like a tank. So it’s the division of labour and it’s the pattern of accepted consumption that has to do with status and masculinity. But again, it’s this ambiguous integration into society. A woman who earns more money and is part of the upper middle class or elite is very differently inscribed and attached to the imperial mode of living than a poor woman.

We argue that inequality is a precondition of the imperial mode of living and it’s a consequence. The imperial mode of living can be realized because we have this huge inequality, the exclusive character, the class and gender and race-based character. But the effect is also stabilizing social inequality. When we look at the Global North and South relation it’s even stronger.

CD: Another key aspect of the argument concerns the Gramscian theory of hegemony. Crucially, this often plays out at the level of unconscious desires, habits, and anxieties. How does a theory of hegemony help us understand the imperial mode of living and its lasting power, especially as it pertains to these unconscious desires?

| An LG advertisement plastered on the side of Saint Marks Basilica in Venice Photo from Flickr | MR Online
An LG advertisement plastered on the side of Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Photo from Flickr.

UB: Let’s start briefly with the split within the Gramscian use of the concept of hegemony. Usually, of course, it’s domination by consent: it’s the specific form of domination that was the great invention of Gramsci with class domination not just power and coercion but also the fabrication of consent. At least within Western Europe, there is the notion of hegemony and of civil society which was very much attached to “the public,” which is close to Jürgen Habermas and his theory. So “the public” is the form of contestation: it’s the form where the consent is produced.

We, coming from Marxism or historical materialism, argue no: hegemony is practiced in the everyday, consciously or unconsciously. So we have to think not only about the huge public debates: “How’s the energy transition working?” and so on. We have to look in a finer sense about how people make their living and what is attractive in it. Even Gramsci distinguished between active consent and passive consent. He said the active consent is usually the upper middle classes thinking: “This is great, we want to maintain our life.” The passive consent is: “I don’t have an alternative. I don’t want to be exploited or I don’t want to have a boring life but I don’t have any alternatives.” This is passive consent.

Our point is close, if you like, to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: that this form of living—of desires—is corporealized. It’s part of our subjectivities and part of our body, our wish to have more. This is when it comes to the politicization or the critique of the imperial mode of living. It’s not only the great public debate and hegemony. Of course, we need protest movement, we need this debate. But it’s not enough. Those protest movements and debates should look also at what are the preconditions of people and of their living? It broadens the political perspective of alternatives quite a lot when we have this take of the Gramscian notion of hegemony.

CD: The imperial mode of living is contrasted with a potential solidary mode of living that works to shift subjectivities and social conditions through a radical transformation towards a global care economy. What are some of the key aspects of the solidary mode of living?

UB: To start with, we tried to argue with our book against a very dynamic treatment dealing with ecological crisis: what we call green capitalism, or the green economy, or ecological modernization of capitalism. Which is: we have a problem with the combustion engine so it should be the electric engine. This will not be sufficient, we know, because the resources have to come from the South and there is still the space problem.

We prepare our argument of solidary mode of living against a strong expectation of the green side of the government in Germany and Austria that we don’t have to question our imperial mode of living: we green it a bit. There’s a greening ecological modernization, if you like. I’m sure in Canada you have similar debates. Even many movements believed it; not the radical movements, but many NGOs and so on.

We argue: no, if we take the problem seriously: that we have to get rid of the capitalist growth imperative, that we have to get rid of the world resources market, this enormous flow from the South to the North. We need principles but also to take seriously experiences and then certain policies towards the solidary mode of living. This chapter is a first attempt. It’s very comprehensive and it was also criticized—which is why we’re writing another book.

But you point at a distinction which to us seems crucial: the distinction between the subjective preconditions and the objective preconditions. We don’t accept an environmentalist discourse that says “it’s just behaviour, it’s just the consciousness.” But we also don’t say, “it’s just the policy framework.” We say that if we want a real mobility transition, but only from the combustion engine to the electric engine, we need an understanding via conflicts and via learning processes that the car is not only not necessary but it’s not attractive. It’s a struggle over subjectivities that what we call the “automobile imperial mode of living” or “imperial automobility” is not any longer possible.

The objective conditions are the other infrastructures, the other production systems, which means also a loss of jobs. I work a lot with trade unions on this. A reduction of the car industry means to rethink how the production of mobility is organized and to take the power from the automotive industry and to produce much more the means for public transport. The argument from the automotive industry is always: “There is job loss.” And the unions are on their side. It’s necessarily to convince them to have good public transport—which does not mean planes but a good train and bus system—means also to create jobs. This is the subjective and objective.

Then, we have some principles. One principle, since we come from critical theory, is that the care principle—a principle to organize society carefully: to have care for yourself, for others, for nature, for society—should overrule the profit principle of the large companies. At the large scale of the automotive industry and military, the profit motive turns into political power. We have to reduce certain production but we also have to change property relations.

Another principle beside this care principle is to rebuild the public sector. Of course, we have many problems with the public sector. Corruption, inefficiency: we are aware of these things. But to guarantee basic provisioning, we need a strong public sector because this can be made responsible. When it comes to pensions, when it comes to health, when it comes to education, the private principle is “who has the money?” The public principle is that it’s a social right.

Finally, we argue that we need strong social movements, which are usually the indicators of the need of radical change. We have this wonderful movement in Germany to leave the coal in the soiland the anti-nuclear movement that has decades of experiences and work. At the end, it’s political contestation: it needs to be armoured—to draw on Gramsci—with coercion and the finances of the state. It needs a macro perspective. It’s not enough to remain within a niche. But we defend that the radical innovation usually comes from the edges. For example, we don’t argue “we have to wait until the majority wants it.” We need these starting points of an emancipatory politics, which means criticizing domination in a manyfold sense.

The major challenge we are working on now is to think of a solidary mode of living beyond the national scale. What does it mean to restructure world market flows and power: a very structural inequality? Often, a socialist or ecosocialist perspective is implicitly sticking to the nation state such as Canada or Germany. What we need much more is to think in very concrete steps about what it would really mean to get rid of or at least weaken an international and global division of labour that is reproducing the imperial mode of living.

https://mronline.org/2022/06/28/transce ... of-living/

Ulrich, ya gotta say 'revolution' if you're serious about the rest of that stuff. Capitalism will not just 'go away' without it.

"Can you say, "Expropriation without compensation!"? I wonder....
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 06, 2022 4:03 pm

The US masks its decline with the rhetoric of triumphalism
July 6, 8:28 am

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NI: The US is masking its decline with the rhetoric of triumphalism

The difficulties that Vladimir Putin faced in the early stages of his military sting operation in Ukraine are now being used to revive Cold War rhetoric about American leadership, the battle for global democracy, and Western unity. However, according to Lyndon Johnson School of Communications professor, Tablet columnist and New America researcher Michael Lind, the reality is that the United States is retreating, failing, or stumped.

Globally, the U.S. campaign to force other countries to impose sanctions on Russia to punish it for its sting operation in Ukraine has failed, writes The National Interest. The countries that imposed sanctions against Russia included the United States and Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Most of the largest countries in the world, including India, Mexico and Brazil, as well as most of the countries of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, refused to meet America halfway.

The United States is also suffering hard blows from a series of humiliating strategic defeats. The flight from Afghanistan led to an even more chaotic and shameful situation than the fall of South Vietnam. In post-Saddam Iraq, the continued US presence is opposed by many Iraqis, and the Iraqi parliament recently passed a law punishing normalization of relations with Israel with the death penalty or life imprisonment. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad survived military attacks from Washington aimed at overthrowing him.

But America's main superpower and great adversary is China. News that the United States is short of Javelin and Stinger missiles to replenish Ukraine's military stockpiles, Michael Lind said, only confirms Beijing's view that America is a paper tiger.

China is the main supplier of imported goods to the United States, and the US trade deficit with China has widened dramatically over the past few years. China is pushing the US and its allies out of one global market after another. In 2010, China surpassed America as the world's leading producer. In 2021, China has surpassed South Korea as the world's leading shipbuilding power. One Chinese company, DJI, produces 70% of the civilian drones in the world. A third of the world's industrial robots are made in China, which is also the world's largest market for them. It is probably only a matter of time before China takes on the United States, Europe and Japan in the aerospace and automotive fields.

“Wherever we look, we see the United States retreating, failing, or deadlocked in everything, whether in the military or in international trade and manufacturing, but in the remaining spheres of influence in North America and Europe. they are still trying to play the role of hegemon and try to revive the glory of their past, ”concludes the author of the material.

https://russian.rt.com/inotv/2022-07-06 ... voj-upadok - zinc

To check how much the US is already a "paper tiger" at this stage, the Chinese will soon have the opportunity. If it is beneficial for China to delay the military operation in Taiwan in anticipation of a further decline of the United States, then on the contrary, it is beneficial for the United States to force this conflict (as they have already done in Ukraine) in order to prevent the further rise of China.

After all, the United States is not only adding rhetoric, but also quite specific practical actions in order to substantiate its claims to retain the role of hegemon, although it is obviously no longer able to play this role. But this global failure does not prevent the United States from unleashing new wars and inflicting various blows on its competitors. The underestimation of the United States is just as dangerous as its overestimation.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7721627.html

“Discussions about the“ amputation of the legs ”of the nuclear triad in the United States came to naught”
July 6, 9:59 am

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Quite an interesting interview with Stefanovich about the current nuclear arms race and the state of the Russian and American nuclear batons.

“Discussions about the“ amputation of the legs ”of the nuclear triad in the United States came to naught”

- Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov expressed hope that the United States would not use nuclear weapons because of the Russian operation in Ukraine. Could the Ukrainian events escalate into a nuclear conflict?

- The threat of the use of nuclear weapons always exists - from the moment of its appearance and, apparently, until the moment when “nuclear zero” is reached, if one ever happens. In the context of the NMD, Sergei Ryabkov's thesis looks like a fairly high-quality "prick" of Western partners, who constantly talk about crazy scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in connection with military operations on the territory of Ukraine. At the same time, of course, there are several very real escalation scenarios associated with the possible involvement of third countries in the conflict and its transition to the regional or even global level, which could create conditions for the use of nuclear weapons.

- As for the use of tactical nuclear weapons - can they be used in Ukraine after hypersonic, given the growing escalation of the conflict?

– It is interesting that you mentioned hypersonic weapons as a kind of separate stage of escalation. Despite the fact that, in fact, this is only one of the types of long-range precision weapons that can have both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, the opinion about its "intermediate" nature between conventional and nuclear weapons is quite widespread. At the same time, as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, there is not yet a single target task that it would allow to solve (and conventional weapons could not) without creating a whole bunch of new problems.

– What is the state of the nuclear triads of Russia and the USA today?

- Nuclear triads are being modernized both in Russia and in the United States, although in the case of Russia we are more likely to have the final stage: the re-equipment of the corresponding missile divisions on the Yarsy is being completed, the process of deploying the Avangard missile system with a hypersonic glide wing unit is underway, tests have begun heavy ICBM "Sarmat", at an advanced stage is the modernization of combat control systems, as well as infrastructure (although not without flaws and delays, as usual).
As part of the marine part of the triad, we can talk about the increasingly significant role of the new strategic missile submarines of the Borey family with the Bulava missile, while maintaining the Sineva and Liner missiles on combat duty on Project 667BDRM submarines.
The air "leg" is still based on deeply modernized Tu-95MSM and Tu-160M ​​bombers, and, as far as one can judge, the restoration of production of the latter is still successful.

At the same time, the X-102 cruise missile for aviation strategic nuclear forces is perhaps the most advanced product of this class in the world, and certainly the most modern. We have also launched a project to modernize Tu-22M3 long-range bombers to the M3M version, which, theoretically, could lead to an “upgrade” of their class to strategic carriers, including according to the classification of the current START. At the same time, the project of the promising PAK DA bomber is moving rather slowly, and it is still difficult to judge its fate. Also, one cannot but mention the “exotic” delivery vehicles with nuclear power plants - the Burevestnik unlimited-range cruise missile, of an unknown type of basing, as well as the Poseidon multi-purpose ocean system. For the first product, it is not yet necessary to make forecasts about putting into service, for the second, probably, within a year or two, the first full-time carriers will appear, however, the degree of combat readiness of the Poseidon, as well as the priority tasks of this underwater drone, remain unknown. In general, these projects appear to be in the nature of "insurance" in case of breakthrough achievements in the field of missile defense in the United States.

The Americans are also modernizing the entire triad, but it is at an earlier stage. True, if, for example, the land-based Minuteman-3 is a rather old product, and, apparently, is inferior to Yars and its modifications (there are simply no analogues of Sarmat and Avangard in the USA and, apparently, are not expected) , then the marine Trident II remains a kind of benchmark for submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

In the first case, the program of the new Sentinel ICBM was launched, the appearance of which is still being worked out, in the second case, the new missile is unlikely to appear on the agenda before the end of the current decade, but new carriers, nuclear submarines with new-generation Columbia ballistic missiles, have already begun construction.

As for the air part of the triad, here we also see the new B-21 Raider bomber, which, albeit not without moving the terms “to the right”, should become the basis of American strategic aviation (including its non-nuclear part) in the foreseeable future, and promising strategic cruise missile LRSO, the appearance of which is still mostly questionable.
Discussions about the possibility of “chopping off” individual projects or even entire “legs” of the American triad have, in fact, come to naught, which is more likely due not so much to tensions in relations with Russia, but to the buildup of Chinese nuclear potential, visible to the naked eye.

- How can today's events affect the nuclear programs of Russia, the USA, North Korea, China?

– It is hardly possible to talk about any radical problems with nuclear programs due to sanctions, after all, in this area the emphasis on independence is traditional, and in North Korea, in general, most of their nuclear missile achievements were carried out under the most severe sanctions pressure . Of course, some individual elements may experience difficulties, but, again, we are talking about the degree of such difficulties. A few years ago, for example, in the American media, citing intelligence data, it was reported about a limited supply of carbon fiber for the winged blocks of the Avangard complex - indicating that it would be enough "only" for 60 units. According to all estimates, this is more than enough for a very long period of deployment of this system, even taking into account the possible integration of such gliding cruise units with the Sarmat missile.
At the same time, it is possible that pressure, both sanctions and other types, may push, for example, Russia and China to more and more cooperation in the strategic sphere, and the DPRK to more and more “aggressive” tests and rhetoric.

To replace the Minuteman-3, the United States is developing the Sentinel missile, it should enter service by 2029. Is this realistic, given the failures of the United States, for example, with hypersonic missiles?

- Options for upgrading the Minuteman-3 were considered and were found to be inefficient, including economically, and, again, an insufficient solution in the long term. By the way, there is an even simpler option - to load Trident II into the existing mines after appropriate refinement. At the same time, the new Sentinel missile is still a priority option. There are no doubts that this US project is within its power, however, of course, as with any new strategic "product", the emergence of current problems is inevitable. But, I think, in 7-8 years they should manage.

- Why has the US not been engaged in nuclear weapons for 30 years?

- I think the main reason is the choice as a priority of what can be used in real armed conflicts, that is, conventional weapons, combined with a fairly good pace of nuclear disarmament, and in general a relatively long period of absence of direct confrontation between nuclear superpowers - Russia and USA. Now the atmosphere is different, and there are more participants, including in terms of nuclear deterrence.

– It is known that the “youngest” US W-88 nuclear warhead, which can be equipped with a Trident II missile, was launched in the 1980s. What is the problem with creating new nuclear warheads?

- Despite the years of production, there is a constant maintenance and maintenance of nuclear arsenals, all the necessary work is modeled and in general, hardly anyone should doubt the effectiveness of existing nuclear warheads. At the same time, a program has also been launched for a new W93 warhead (with some participation from the UK), as well as for the production of new plutonium cores (“pits”) to replace existing ones. Not everything is perfect, in particular, the target of 80 pitas per year by 2030 may not be reached. But this is unlikely to undermine the American nuclear potential in any way, at least in the medium term.

North Korea is preparing for nuclear tests. What's up with their nuclear program at the moment?

- The DPRK is working to improve its nuclear weapons, both for conditional "strategic" tasks, and for "tactical" ones. Delivery systems are being developed and improved, and, apparently, in the foreseeable future, Pyongyang will have a fairly diverse arsenal - from relatively low-yield and small warheads for tactical missile systems to megaton-class thermonuclear warheads designed for ICBMs. Apparently, missiles with hypersonic gliders of various types will also be nuclear or dual-purpose. Another thing is that full-scale tests are needed for the guaranteed operation of all this "economy", so it is unlikely that Kim and his team will let us get bored.

- Finland and Sweden are preparing to join NATO, the United States said that if they join the alliance, they do not guarantee the non-deployment of nuclear weapons near Russia's borders - in Finland. What is the point of placing it close, given its range?

- Deployment of nuclear weapons directly "near the line of contact" really looks quite doubtful from the point of view of military expediency. At the same time, the political signal, of course, turns out to be obvious: NATO is a nuclear alliance, and is ready to use nuclear weapons to protect its members at any stage of the conflict, which is symbolized by the presence of the appropriate potential directly “on the ground”. This design is not that very elegant, but it seems to work. Another thing is that, for example, such actions will not be very compatible both with the provisions of the still living Russia-NATO Founding Act (although many already doubt this), as well as with the first two articles of the NPT, as Russia regularly points out.

In general, there are quite a few questions, and even without nuclear weapons, NATO is quite capable of complicating the defense of the Russian Federation with the help of Sweden and Finland - these are long-range strike systems, and intelligence infrastructure, and, possibly, additional forward-based missile defense and air defense facilities.
The Russian response, as it was stated, will directly depend on where the situation in this area will move.

In principle, as if just for such a case, in our “Fundamentals of State Policy in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence” of the 2020 model, there is a separate paragraph at number 12, which directly lists all those “military dangers” “to neutralize which nuclear deterrence is being carried out.”

It can be assumed that, depending on the actions of NATO, there will be a refinement of the goals, scenarios for the use and geography of the deployment of the Russian armed forces, and primarily in terms of non-strategic nuclear and strategic non-nuclear weapons, as well as air defense and missile defense systems.

https://m.gazeta.ru/army/2022/07/03/15071996.shtml - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7722073.html

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How the Pentagon Uses a Secretive Program to Wage Global Proxy Wars
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 5, 2022
Nick Turse, Alice Speri

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Exclusive documents and interviews reveal the sweeping scope of classified 127e operations.

SMALL TEAMS OF U.S. Special Operations forces are involved in a low-profile proxy war program on a far greater scale than previously known, according to exclusive documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials.

While The Intercept and other outlets have previously reported on the Pentagon’s use of the secretive 127e authority in multiple African countries, a new document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act offers the first official confirmation that at least 14 127e programs were also active in the greater Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region as recently as 2020. In total, between 2017 and 2020, U.S. commandos conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the world.

Separately, Joseph Votel, a retired four-star Army general who headed both Special Operations Command and Central Command, which oversees U.S. military efforts in the Middle East, confirmed the existence of previously unrevealed 127e “counterterrorism” efforts in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

Another former senior defense official, who requested anonymity to discuss a classified program, confirmed that an earlier version of the 127e program had also been in place in Iraq. A 127e program in Tunisia, code-named Obsidian Tower, which has never been acknowledged by the Pentagon or previously identified as a use of the 127e authority, resulted in combat by U.S. forces alongside local surrogates in 2017, according to another set of documents obtained by The Intercept. A third document, a secret memo that was redacted and declassified for release to The Intercept, sheds light on hallmarks of the program, including use of the authority to provide access to areas of the world otherwise inaccessible even to the most elite U.S. troops.

The documents and interviews provide the most detailed picture yet of an obscure funding authority that allows American commandos to conduct counterterrorism operations “by, with, and through” foreign and irregular partner forces around the world. Basic information about these missions — where they are conducted, their frequency and targets, and the foreign forces the U.S. relies on to carry them out — are unknown even to most members of relevant congressional committees and key State Department personnel.

Through 127e, the U.S. arms, trains, and provides intelligence to foreign forces. But unlike traditional foreign assistance programs, which are primarily intended to build local capacity, 127e partners are then dispatched on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims. “The foreign participants in a 127-echo program are filling gaps that we don’t have enough Americans to fill,” a former senior defense official involved with the program told The Intercept. “If someone were to call a 127-echo program a proxy operation, it would be hard to argue with them.”

Retired generals with intimate knowledge of the 127e program — known in military parlance as “127-echo” — say that it is extremely effective in targeting militant groups while reducing risk to U.S. forces. But experts told The Intercept that use of the little-known authority raises grave accountability and oversight concerns and potentially violates the U.S. Constitution.

One of the documents obtained by The Intercept puts the cost of 127e operations between 2017 and 2020 at $310 million, a fraction of U.S. military spending over that time period but a significant increase from the $25 million budget allocated to the program when it was first authorized, under a different name, in 2005.

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Source: Pentagon documents and former officials.Graphics: Soohee Cho for The Intercept

While critics contend that, due to a lack of oversight, 127e programs risk involving the United States in human rights abuses and entangling the U.S. in foreign conflicts unbeknownst to Congress and the American people, former commanders say the 127e authority is crucial to combating terrorism.

“I think this is an invaluable authority,” Votel told The Intercept. “It provides the ability to pursue U.S. counterterrorism objectives with local forces that can be tailored to the unique circumstances of the specific area of operations.”

The 127e authority first faced significant scrutiny after four U.S. soldiers were killed by Islamic State militants during a 2017 ambush in Niger and several high-ranking senators claimed to know little about U.S. operations there. Previous reporting, by The Intercept and others, has documented 127e efforts in multiple African countries, including a partnership with a notoriously abusive unit of the Cameroonian military that continued long after its members were connected to mass atrocities.

For more than a year, the White House has failed to provide The Intercept with substantive comment about operations by U.S. commandos outside conventional war zones and specifically failed to address the use of 127e programs. Asked for a general comment about the utility of the 127e authority and its role in the administration’s counterterrorism strategy, Patrick Evans, a National Security Council spokesperson, replied: “These all fall under the Department of Defense.” The Pentagon and Special Operations Command refuse to comment on the 127e authority. “We do not provide information about 127e programs because they are classified,” SOCOM spokesperson Ken McGraw told The Intercept.

Critics of 127e warn that in addition to the risk of unanticipated military escalation and the potential costs of engaging in up to a dozen conflicts around the world, some operations may amount to an unlawful use of force. Because most members of Congress — including those directly responsible for overseeing foreign affairs — have no input and little visibility into where and how the programs are run, 127e-related hostilities can lack the congressional authorization required by the U.S. Constitution, argued Katherine Ebright, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.

“There’s reason to suspect the Department of Defense has used 127e partners to engage in combat beyond the scope of any authorization for use of military force or permissible self-defense,” Ebright told The Intercept, noting substantial confusion at the Pentagon and in Congress over a stipulation that 127e programs support only authorized ongoing military operations. “That kind of unauthorized use of force, even through partners rather than U.S. soldiers themselves, would contravene constitutional principles.”

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A U.S. Army Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha team soldier, likely on a 127e mission, according to journalist Wes Morgan, is seen along with Nigerien counterparts at a Nigerien Army range on Sept. 11, 2017. Photo: Richard Bumgardner, SOCFWD-NWA Public Affairs

Global Proxy War

The origins of the 127e program can be traced back to the earliest days of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, as commandos and CIA personnel sought to support the Afghan Northern Alliance in its fight against the Taliban. Army Special Operations Command soon realized that it lacked the authority to provide direct payments to its new proxies and was forced to rely on CIA funding. This prompted a broader push by SOCOM to secure the ability to support foreign forces in so-called missions, a military corollary to the CIA’s use of militia surrogates. First known as Section 1208, the authority was also deployed in the early years of the Iraq invasion, according to a former senior defense official. It was ultimately enshrined in U.S. law under U.S.C. Title 10 § 127e.

127e is one of several virtually unknown authorities granted to the Defense Department by Congress over the last two decades that allow U.S. commandos to conduct operations on the fringes of war and with minimal outside oversight. While 127e focuses on “counterterrorism,” other authorities allow elite forces — Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and Marine Raiders among them — to conduct clandestine intelligence and counterintelligence operations or assist foreign forces in irregular warfare, primarily in the context of so-called great power competition. In April, top Special Operations officials unveiled a new “Vision and Strategy” framework that appears to endorse continued reliance on the 127e concept by leveraging “burden sharing partnerships to achieve objectives within an acceptable level of risk.”

Gen. Richard D. Clarke, the current Special Operations commander, testified before Congress in 2019 that 127e programs “directly resulted in the capture or killing of thousands of terrorists, disrupted terrorist networks and activities, and denied terrorists operating space across a wide range of operating environments, at a fraction of the cost of other programs.”

Clarke’s claims cannot be verified. A SOCOM spokesperson told The Intercept that the command does not have figures on those captured or killed during 127e missions. It is also not known how many foreign forces and civilians have been killed in these operations, but a former defense official confirmed to The Intercept that there have been U.S. casualties, even as U.S. troops are traditionally expected to stay behind “last cover and concealment” during a foreign partner’s operations.

The documents obtained by The Intercept tout the importance of the authority, particularly in providing U.S. special operators a way into difficult-to-access areas. According to a memo, one 127e program provided “the only human physical access to areas,” with local partners “focused on finding, fixing, and finishing” enemy forces. Another 127e program targeting Al Qaeda and its affiliates similarly allowed commandos to project “combat power into previously-inaccessible VEO [violent extremist organization] safe havens.”General Joseph L. Votel, U.S. Central Command

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Commander, meets members of the Lebanese Armed Forces during his visit to the Amchit military base August 23, 2016. Photo: U.S. Embassy Beirut

Some documents obtained via FOIA are so heavily redacted that it is difficult to identify the countries where the programs took place and the forces with which the U.S. partnered. The Intercept previously identified the BIR, or Rapid Intervention Battalion, as the notorious Cameroonian military unit with which the U.S. ran a 127e program. The Intercept has now identified another previously unknown partnership with the G2 Strike Force, or G2SF, an elite special unit of the Lebanese military with which the U.S. partnered to target ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates in Lebanon.

Votel confirmed that the 127e in Lebanon was code-named Lion Hunter. He also acknowledged previously unknown 127e programs in Syria; Yemen, known as Yukon Hunter; and Egypt, code-named Enigma Hunter, where U.S. Special Operations forces partnered with the Egyptian military to target ISIS militants in the Sinai Peninsula. He said that the chief of the Egyptian military intelligence service provided “strong support” for Enigma Hunter and that American troops did not accompany their local partners into combat there, as is common in other African countries.


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A heavily redacted memorandum on the 127e program obtained via FOIA. Screenshot: The Intercept

The U.S. has a long history of assistance to both the Egyptian and Lebanese militaries, but the use of Egyptian and Lebanese forces as proxies for U.S. counterterrorism missions marked a significant development in those relationships, several experts noted.

Two experts on Lebanese security noted that the G2SF is an elite, secretive unit mostly tasked with intelligence work and that it was not surprising that it was the unit chosen for the 127e program by U.S. Special Operations, with which it already enjoyed a strong relationship. One noted that unlike other elements of the country’s security forces, the unit was “far less politicized.”

The situation is more complex in Egypt, where the military has for decades relied on billions of dollars in U.S. security assistance but resisted U.S. efforts to track how that assistance is used.

While Sinai is subject to a near-total media blackout, human rights groups have documented widespread abuses by the Egyptian military there, including “arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, and possibly unlawful air and ground attacks against civilians.”

“There are legitimate issues with the U.S. partnering with some units of the Egyptian military,” said Seth Binder, director of advocacy at the Project on Middle East Democracy. “There has been great documentation, by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, of numerous human rights abuses in the Sinai by the Egyptian military. Are these the same units we’re partnering with to carry out operations? That’s a real concern.”

The Egyptian Embassy in the United States did not respond to a request for comment, but in a joint statement last fall, U.S. and Egyptian officials committed to “discussing best practices in reducing civilian harm in military operations” — a tacit admission that civilian harm remained an issue. Requests for interviews with the embassies of Iraq, Tunisia, and Yemen, as well as Lebanon’s Ministry of Defense, went unanswered.

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U.S. Army Gen. Richard D. Clarke, center, takes command of the U.S. Special Operations Command from U.S. Army Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III, right, during a ceremony in Tampa, Fla., on March 29, 2019. Photo: Lisa Ferdinando/DoD

No Vetting, No Oversight

While the documents obtained by The Intercept offer clues about the scope and contours of the 127e program, much remains unknown to both the public and members of Congress. Relevant reports required by law are classified at a level that prevents most congressional staffers from accessing them. A government official familiar with the program, who requested anonymity to discuss it, estimated that only a handful of people on Congress’s armed services and intelligence committees read such reports. Congressional foreign affairs and relations committees — even though they have primary responsibility for deciding where the U.S. is at war and can use force — do not receive them. And most congressional representatives and staff with clearance to access the reports do not know to ask for them. “It’s true that any member of Congress could read any of these reports, but I mean, they don’t even know they exist,” the government official added. “It was designed to prevent oversight.”

But it is not just Congress that’s largely kept in the dark about the program: Officials at the State Department with the relevant expertise are also often unaware. While 127e requires signoff by the chief of mission in the country where the program is carried out, detailed information is rarely shared by those diplomats with officials in Washington.

The lack of oversight across levels of the U.S. government is in part the result of the extreme secrecy with which defense officials have shielded their authority over the program — and of the scant pushback they have faced. “It’s State not knowing what they don’t know, so they don’t even know to ask. It’s the ambassadors being sort of wowed by these four-star generals who come in and say, ‘If you don’t let us do this, everyone’s going to die,’” the government official said. “DOD views this as a small, tiny program that doesn’t have foreign policy implications, so, ‘Let’s just do it. The less people get in our way, the easier.’”

Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group and formerly associate general counsel at the Defense Department’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, echoed that assessment. “HASC and SASC appear opposed to increasing oversight of 127-echo. They are not inclined to change the statute to strengthen State’s oversight, nor are they adequately sharing documents related to the program with personal [congressional] staff,” she said, using the acronyms of the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee. “This may seem like an arcane, bureaucratic issue, but it really matters for oversight of the 127-echo program and all other programs that are run in secret.”

Those programs include an authority, known as Section 1202, that first appeared in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act and provides “support to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups, or individuals” that are taking part in irregular warfare and are explicitly focused on so-called near-peer competitors. Congress has also authorized the secretary of defense to “expend up to $15,000,000 in any fiscal year for clandestine activities for any purpose the Secretary determines to be proper for preparation of the environment for operations of a confidential nature” under 10 USC § 127f, or “127 foxtrot.” Section 1057 authority similarly allows for intelligence and counterintelligence activities in response to threats of a “confidential, extraordinary, or emergency nature.”

“This has been sort of the story for a lot of these DOD-run programs,” said Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, a grassroots-funded U.S. foreign policy think tank. “The Special Operations community likes autonomy a lot. They don’t like going through bureaucracy, so they always invent authorities, trying to find ways around having their operations delayed for any reason.”

“The problem is this stuff is so normalized,” he added. “There should be more attention paid to these train-and-equip authorities, whether it’s special forces or DOD regular, because it’s really kind of a PR-friendly way to sell endless war.”

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/07/ ... roxy-wars/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 09, 2022 3:21 pm

Before its Final Defeat, the U.S. Empire Will Try to Take the Rest of the World Down With it
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 8, 2022
Rainer Shea

If U.S. imperialism gets its way, during our generation it will commit a gargantuan series of atrocities that take many millions of lives. It could carry out nuclear attacks against one or more of the countries challenging it, repeating its great crimes against the people of Japan with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In its desperation for recovering its diminishing imperial holdings, it could invade a country like Venezuela or Iran, leading to World War III. It could launch a campaign to exterminate political undesirables within U.S. borders, repeating the mass executions that have taken place under the regimes the CIA has installed. The possibilities for tragedy are historically unparalleled, because this is a mad dog regime that’s more equipped than any past dictatorship to inflict death and destruction. It’s finding itself cornered, and will at some point react by using the full strength of its tools for imperialist violence.

When the German imperialists found their colonial holdings diminished following World War I, and faced with the economic fallout from capitalism’s crises, they reacted by backing the agenda of the Nazis. The Nazis offered to build up Germany’s military strength, to reinvigorate the economy through a racially selective bastardization of “socialism,” to expand the nation’s land access by turning the rest of Eurasia into a ground for colonial conquest. To the capitalists on both sides of the Atlantic who facilitated Hitler’s industry, and to the petty bourgeois Germans who made up fascism’s social base, the madness of Hitler’s drastic plans for aggression didn’t matter. They didn’t care how this would inevitably bring proportionate blowback upon Germany. They sought to eliminate the groups they saw as a scourge upon the white supremacist cause, and to revitalize the German empire by carrying out plunder through any means necessary. And they succeeded, insofar as Germany has never truly had to pay for its crimes and has been able to become one of the richest countries following its military defeat.

The other colonial powers never fundamentally cared about the Third Reich’s atrocities, because they routinely commit mass murder on par with the Holocaust. So they enabled the regime’s rise, and left the cleanup job to the twenty-seven million Russians who died in the war. Then they only selectively held the war criminals accountable, letting numerous former Nazi officials help them found NATO, recruiting Nazi scientists to provide the U.S. empire with intellectual property, and using the Nazis who fled to South America as specialized partners in torturing political dissidents under the U.S.-backed dictatorships.

The U.S. imperialists expect to be able to intensify their violence in the coming decades, while being allowed the same kind of impunity by the other members of the imperialist bloc. Their proxy war against Russia has managed to unify all of the imperialist countries behind Washington’s agenda for a revived Nazi anti-Russian campaign within Ukraine. Every one of these regimes has decided to overlook the ethnic cleansing, anti-democratic policies, and Nazi militia collaboration that the U.S.-installed Kiev leadership has carried out. They’re providing Kiev with all the weapons it needs to continue terrorizing the Russian speakers who Ukrainian nationalists dehumanize. They’re willing to risk a third world war if that’s what it takes to break up Russia, and to subdue China by extension. They’re not going to succeed in this goal of destabilizing Eurasia, and of expanding their decaying colonial project into a new front across the continent. When they realize how futile their Ukraine war effort is, they’ll be willing to enable whatever new horrors Washington tries to cook up.

When it comes to Washington’s backing of the Saudi genocide against Yemen, meddling that’s leading to famine in Ethiopia, sanctions that are leading to famine in Afghanistan, assistance of Israel’s intensifying crimes against Palestine, and broader sanctions and military atrocities, the U.S. empire’s partners in evil have absolutely been standing by it. Washington is taking advantage of capitalism’s converging crises, mainly global warming and the pandemic, to make its warfare more deadly. And no power is able or willing to sufficiently hold it accountable, or to prevent its crimes from continuing.

The biggest anti-imperialist powers, those being Russia, China, and Iran, have been gaining more of an ability to defend themselves and help smaller countries targeted by the imperialists. Iran has allowed Venezuela to defy sanctions through oil transportation, Russia has defended Syria and the Donbass from imperialist threats, and China has been building an economic development network to lift impoverished countries out of the poverty imperialism has engineered. But it’s so far not enough to save the Palestinians, the Yemenis, and the other vulnerable peoples. As the YouTube channel Nova Lectio International recently observed, “Yemen is dying and nobody cares.”

When the imperialists get desperate enough, and their ability to inflict harm upon the globe gets so decrepit that they’re fully kicked out of Asia or other cold war fronts, they’ll turn their violence against the vulnerable peoples within the core. They’ve already been doing so to incremental degrees, intensifying the banal violence of capitalism and colonialism. They’ve funneled weapons from their recent wars into U.S. police departments while training law enforcement in Israeli repressive techniques, leading to a rise in police brutality against minoritized groups. They’ve built a network of concentration camps for the people who’ve been displaced by imperialist meddling in Latin America, separating refugee families and subjecting their children to vile conditions. They’ve neglected aid to the tribes during the pandemic and deliberately mismanaged the health crisis, leading to Black, Indigenous, and other colonized peoples getting disproportionately killed by the virus. By refusing to pay reparations, they’ve doomed impoverished Black communities to be especially damaged by climate-exacerbated disasters.

This war against their own people is always expanding, recently getting intensified when it comes to attacks on LGBT rights and women’s rights. There’s no point at which the situation will stop worsening, not until the settler capitalist state is overthrown and replaced by a post-colonial socialist federation. To defeat the forces of reaction, there needs to be a robust revolutionary organizing apparatus, one that’s equipped to address society’s contradictions, fight off the violence of the reactionaries, and build proletarian democracy. The U.S. empire is doing all it can to prevent this, cultivating fascist militias to terrorize the masses, militarizing the police, and aggressively mobilizing the National Guard whenever serious unrest breaks out. The state is waging a counterinsurgency to keep the masses demobilized, and to keep the destructive engine of empire in motion.

The country’s bourgeois “democracy” is ready to fully give way to a reactionary takeover equivalent to the one Germany underwent during its moment of desperation. The Democratic Party has discredited itself as a force capable of addressing the needs of the people, and the fascists are mobilizing to complete the transition towards unconcealed tyranny. The war machine is intertwined with this process, its operations facilitated by both parties. Now that the Democrats have committed the U.S. towards backing Nazi terror in Ukraine for the sake of scoring geopolitical points, this fascist paramilitarism will be reflected within U.S. borders. The Hitlerite racism Washington is cultivating abroad is furthering the rise of Nazism here, providing a pipeline and training ground for white supremacy. It’s all connected, and it’s all leading towards a catastrophe on this continent which repeats the fascist atrocities of World War II.

Adolf Hitler praised the United States, and took explicit inspiration from it, because it created a working example of mass racist violence for the sake of empire-building. The United States incorporated the Nazis into its postwar operations because the Nazis advanced Washington’s imperial goals. Now that imperialism has reached its final stage of collapse, with capital ever more desperate to suppress the class struggle, the U.S. empire will employ Nazism’s model for waging war against its enemies. If the forces of anti-imperialism don’t defeat it in time, this could bring about destruction as bad or worse than that which the Nazis created.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/07/ ... n-with-it/

Well, mebbe, I certainly won't rule it out. Yet it is always easier to rule with some degree of consent from the masses.The demographic shift which is giving white racists apocalyptic conniptions is being played by the corporate bosses in their show of giving a damn about 'diversity', which amounts to harvesting many of the best and brightest from oppressed groups to reinvigorate their operations and placate critics. While said groups are left in the filthy dust, as usual. It is much the same with the bogus 'greening' of capitalism, three parts PR one part financial advantage and who cares what the hell the original premise was anyway.

The 'out-front fascism' scenario is not quite a near as Mr Shea believes, at this moment anyways. Of course that could change fast by some sort of cataclysm, real or imagined. But to contend that the Nazis won is a big stretch, they just didn't lose as badly as was required, because of Western(US) capital. To say otherwise insults the Soviet Union.

One thing though, I have no doubt that when desperate enough they will employ weapons of mass destruction, and nuke US cities to quell a revolution. The models of revolution which have succeeded in the past may not serve as well and new models may be needed. It seems to me that China is on to something: beating capitalists with their own stick while 'disarming' them with their own greed. That game is wearing thin as decline accelerates and how far that can get before the US gets desperate is going to be tricky. And what comes next even trickier.
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 11, 2022 2:18 pm

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Greater Knowledge of the Brain May Lead to Super-Soldiers and Mind Controlled Weapons, Says DIA Report (Photo: )

Fueling the Warfare State
Originally published: TomDispatch on July 7, 2022 by William D. Hartung (more by TomDispatch) (Posted Jul 11, 2022)

This March, when the Biden administration presented a staggering $813 billion proposal for “national defense,” it was hard to imagine a budget that could go significantly higher or be more generous to the denizens of the military-industrial complex. After all, that request represented far more than peak spending in the Korean or Vietnam War years, and well over $100 billion more than at the height of the Cold War.

It was, in fact, an astonishing figure by any measure–more than two-and-a-half times what China spends; more, in fact, than (and hold your hats for this one!) the national security budgets of the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. And yet the weapons industry and hawks in Congress are now demanding that even more be spent.

In recent National Defense Authorization Act proposals, which always set a marker for what Congress is willing to fork over to the Pentagon, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees both voted to increase the 2023 budget yet again–by $45 billion in the case of the Senate and $37 billion for the House. The final figure won’t be determined until later this year, but Congress is likely to add tens of billions of dollars more than even the Biden administration wanted to what will most likely be a record for the Pentagon’s already bloated budget.

This lust for yet more weapons spending is especially misguided at a time when a never-ending pandemic, growing heat waves and other depredations of climate change, and racial and economic injustice are devastating the lives of millions of Americans. Make no mistake about it: the greatest risks to our safety and our future are non-military in nature, with the exception, of course, of the threat of nuclear war, which could increase if the current budget goes through as planned.

But as TomDispatch readers know, the Pentagon is just one element in an ever more costly American national security state. Adding other military, intelligence, and internal-security expenditures to the Pentagon’s budget brings the total upcoming “national security” budget to a mind-boggling $1.4 trillion. And note that, in June 2021, the last time my colleague Mandy Smithberger and I added up such costs to the taxpayer, that figure was almost $1.3 trillion, so the trend is obvious.

To understand how these vast sums are spent year after year, let’s take a quick tour of America’s national security budget, top to bottom.

The Pentagon’s “Base” Budget

The Pentagon’s proposed “base” budget, which includes all of its routine expenses from personnel to weapons to the costs of operating and maintaining a 1.3 million member military force, came in at $773 billion for 2023, more than $30 billion above that of 2022. Such an increase alone is three times the discretionary budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and more than three times the total allocation for the Environmental Protection Agency.

In all, the Pentagon consumes nearly half of the discretionary budget of the whole federal government, a figure that’s come down slightly in recent years thanks to the Biden administration’s increased investment in civilian activities. That still means, however, that almost anything the government wants to do other than preparing for or waging war involves a scramble for funding, while the Department of Defense gets virtually unlimited financial support.

And keep in mind that the proposed Biden increase in Pentagon spending comes despite the ending of 20 years of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, a move that should have meant significant reductions in the department’s budget. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn, however, that, in the wake of the Afghan disaster, the military establishment and hawks in Congress quickly shifted gears to touting–and exaggerating–challenges posed by China, Russia, and inflation as reasons for absorbing the potential savings from the Afghan War and pressing the Pentagon budget ever higher.

It’s worth looking at what America stands to receive for its $773 billion–or about $2,000 per taxpayer, according to an analysis by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. More than half of that amount goes to giant weapons contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, along with thousands of smaller arms-making firms.

The most concerning part of the new budget proposal, however, may be the administration’s support for a three-decades long, $1.7-trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles (as well, of course, as new warheads to go with them), bombers, and submarines. As the organization Global Zero has pointed out, the United States could dissuade any country from launching an atomic attack against it with far fewer weapons than are contained in its current nuclear arsenal. There’s simply no need for a costly–and risky–nuclear weapons “modernization” plan. Sadly, it’s guaranteed to help fuel a continuing global nuclear arms race, while entrenching nuclear weapons as a mainstay of national security policy for decades to come. (Wouldn’t those decades be so much better spent working to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether?)

The riskiest weapon in that nuclear plan is a new land-based, intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). As former Secretary of Defense William Perry once explained, ICBMs are among “the most dangerous weapons in the world” because a president warned of a nuclear attack would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war based on a false alarm. Not only is a new ICBM unnecessary, but the existing ones should be retired as well, as a way of reducing the potential for a world-ending nuclear conflagration.

To its credit, the Biden administration is trying to get rid of an ill-conceived nuclear weapons program initiated during the Trump years–a sea-launched, nuclear-armed cruise missile that, rather than adding a “deterrent” capability, would raise the risk of a nuclear confrontation. As expected, nuclear hawks in the military and Congress are trying to restore funding for that nuclear SLCM (pronounced “Slick ‘em”).

The Pentagon budget is replete with other unnecessary, overpriced, and often potentially dysfunctional systems that should either be canceled or replaced with more affordable and effective alternatives. The most obvious case in point is the F-35 combat aircraft, meant to carry out multiple missions for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. So far, it does none of them well.

In a series of careful analyses of the aircraft, the Project on Government Oversight determined that it may never be fully ready for combat. As for cost, at an estimated $1.7 trillion over its projected period of service, it’s already the most expensive single weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon. And keep in mind that those costs will only increase as the military services are forced to pay to fix problems that were never addressed in the rush to deploy the plane before it was fully tested. Meanwhile, that aircraft is so complex that, at any given moment, a large percentage of the fleet is down for maintenance, meaning that, if ever called on for combat duty, many of those planes will simply not be available.

In a grudging acknowledgement of the multiple problems plaguing the F-35, the Biden administration proposed decreasing its buy of the plane by about a third in 2023, a figure that should have been much lower given its poor performance. But congressional advocates of the plane–including a large F-35 caucus made up of members in states or districts where parts of it are being produced–will undoubtedly continue to press for more planes than even the Pentagon’s asking for, as the Senate Armed Services Committee did in its markup of the Department of Defense spending bill.

In addition to all of this, the Pentagon’s base budget includes mandatory spending for items like military retirement, totaling an estimated $12.8 billion for 2023.

Running national (in)security tally: $785.8 billion.

The Nuclear Budget
The average taxpayer no doubt assumes that a government agency called the Department of Energy (DOE) would be primarily concerned with developing new sources of energy, including ones that would reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels to help rein in the ravages of climate change. Unfortunately, that assumption couldn’t be less true.

Instead of spending the bulk of its time and money on energy research and development, more than 40% of the Department of Energy’s budget for 2023 is slated to support the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which manages the country’s nuclear weapons program, principally by maintaining and developing nuclear warheads. Work on other military activities like reactors for nuclear submarines pushes the defense share of the DOE budget even higher. The NNSA spreads its work across the country, with major locations in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Its proposed 2023 budget for nuclear-weapons activities is $16.5 billion, part of a budget for defense-related projects of $29.8 billion.

Amazingly the NNSA’s record of managing its programs may be even worse than the Pentagon’s, with cost overruns of more than $28 billion during the last two decades. Many of its current projects, like a plan to build a new facility to produce plutonium “pits”–the devices that trigger the explosion of a hydrogen bomb–are unnecessary even under the current, misguided nuclear weapons modernization plan.

Nuclear budget: $29.8 billion

Running (in)security tally: $815.6 billion

Defense-Related Activities
This catch-all category, pegged at $10.6 billion in 2023, includes the international activities of the FBI and payments to Central Intelligence Agency retirement funds, among other things.

Defense-Related Activities: $10.6 billion

Running (in)security tally: $826.2 billion

The Intelligence Budget
Information about this country’s 18 separate intelligence agencies is largely shielded from public view. Most members of Congress don’t even have staff that can access significant details on how intelligence funds are spent, making meaningful Congressional oversight almost impossible. The only real data supplied with regard to the intelligence agencies is a top-line number–$67.1 billion proposed for 2023, a $5 billion increase over 2022. Most of the intelligence community’s budget is believed to be hidden inside the Pentagon budget. So, in the interests of making a conservative estimate, intelligence spending is not included in our tally.

Intelligence Budget: $67.1 billion

Running (in)security tally still: $826.2 billion

Veterans Affairs Budget
America’s post-9/11 wars have generated millions of veterans, many of whom have returned from battle with severe physical or psychological injuries. As a result, spending on veterans’ affairs has soared, reaching a proposed $301 billion in the 2023 budget plan. Research conducted for the Costs of War Project at Brown University has determined that these costs will only grow, with more than $2 trillion needed just to take care of the veterans of the post-9/11 conflicts.

Veterans Affairs Budget: $301 billion

Running (in)security tally: $1.127 trillion

International Affairs Budget
The International Affairs budget includes non-military items like diplomacy at the State Department and economic aid through the Agency for International Development, critical (but significantly underfunded) parts of the U.S. national security strategy writ large. But even in this category there are significant military-related activities in the form of programs that provide arms and training to foreign militaries and police forces. It’s proposed that the largest of these, the Foreign Military Financing program, should receive $6 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, the total requested International Affairs budget is $67.8 billion in 2023.

International Affairs Budget: $67.8 billion.

Running (in)security tally: $1.195 trillion.

The Homeland Security Budget
After the 9/11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established by combining a wide range of agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Agency, the U.S. Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard. The proposed DHS budget for 2023 is $56.7 billion, more than one-quarter of which goes to Customs and Border Protection as part of a militarized approach to addressing immigration into the United States.

Homeland Security Budget: $56.7 billion.

Running (in)security tally: $1.252 trillion.

Interest on the Debt
The national security state, as outlined so far, is responsible for about 26% of the interest due on the U.S. debt, a total of $152 billion.

Interest on the Debt: $152 billion.

Running (in)security tally: $1.404 trillion.

Our Misguided Security Budget

Spending $1.4 trillion to address a narrowly defined concept of national security should be considered budgetary malpractice on a scale so grand as to be almost unimaginable–especially at a time when the greatest risks to the safety of Americans and the rest of the world are not military in nature. After all, the Covid pandemic has already taken the lives of more than one million Americans, while the fires, floods, and heat waves caused by climate change have impacted tens of millions more.

Yet the administration’s proposed allocation of $45 billion to address climate change in the 2023 budget would be less than 6% of the Pentagon’s proposed budget of $773 billion. And as noted, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are slated to get just one-third of the proposed increase in Pentagon spending between 2022 and 2023. Worse yet, attempts to raise spending significantly to address these urgent challenges, from President Biden’s Build Back Better plan to the Green New Deal, are stalled in Congress.

In a world where such dangers are only increasing, perhaps the best hope for launching a process that could, sooner or later, reverse such perverse priorities lies with grassroots organizing. Consider, for instance the “moral budget” crafted by the Poor People’s Campaign, which would cut Pentagon spending almost in half while refocusing on programs aimed at eliminating poverty, protecting the environment, and improving access to health care. If even part of such an agenda were achieved and the “defense” budget reined in, if not cut drastically, America and the world would be far safer places.

Given the scale of the actual security problems we face, it’s time to think big when it comes to potential solutions, while recognizing what Martin Luther King, Jr., once described as the “fierce urgency of now.” Time is running short, and concerted action is imperative.

https://mronline.org/2022/07/11/fueling ... are-state/

We are ruled by madmen and crazy for letting this continue.
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 23, 2022 3:08 pm

The Biggest Lie The Hawks Ever Sold: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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The US is the only nation on earth whose entire economy is built on arms manufacturing and security guarantees to tyrannical Gulf states. It’s not just correct to call the US empire a uniquely evil power structure, it’s correct to say it’s impossible for it not to be.



Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemen and proxy warfare in Syria are many thousands of times more evil and horrific than the assassination of one Washington Post columnist, but because the empire is built on that kind of bloodshed it gets far less attention.

Biden continuing the unbroken presidential tradition of courting the Saudis is not a betrayal of US values but a very normal expression of them. You either want the complete dismantlement of the US empire or you don’t. If you don’t, quit bitching about how the sausage gets made.



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The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Republicans say they will do evil things and then do evil things, while Democrats say they will not do evil things and then do evil things.



On one hand polls say Americans don’t want Biden to run again, but on the other hand there’s zero chance Democrats put forward a different candidate who’s better than the rotbrained empire mummy.



Friendly reminder that Russiagate was a psyop which had its origins in the US intelligence cartel, was used to facilitate longstanding agendas of the US intelligence cartel, is the reason liberals are now cheerleading the US proxy war in Ukraine, and that only an idiot would call this a coincidence.



Anyone who still buys this schtick is a fucking moron:
Anton Gerashchenko
@Gerashchenko_en

19 year old "Zaporizhzhia Avenger" took down a Russian Su-25 plane with an Igla (Needle) man-portable-defense-system.

This is his sixth plane, and he also took down a cruise missile.

Superheroes do exist in real life.

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7:52 AM · Jul 17, 2022·Twitter for Android
1,398 Retweets 372 Quote Tweets 12K Likes


Current proxy warfare tactics in Ukraine have no chance of delivering a swift defeat to Russia. What they do have is a pretty good chance of creating a costly military quagmire for Russia and a 100 percent certainty of creating massive profits for the arms industry.



The biggest lie the hawks ever sold was that their militaristic policies prevent the problems they actually create. Militarizing against Russia caused this war. The war on terror created terror groups. Continuing the encirclement of China will likely lead to a nasty confrontation there. Etc.



Working to bring down Moscow and Beijing would be a great way to move toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony while simultaneously unleashing the kind of worldwide economic chaos and desperation that shock doctrine capitalism engineers have heretofore only ever dreamed of.



At the end of this clip Bolton cites “classified information” as the reason he won’t name the other US coups he’s helped orchestrate, calling to mind when Assange said “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security”:

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/stat ... _jDLgoi6zA



The most important job of the western media right now is convincing the public that the world’s major powers splitting into two increasingly hostile alliances is probably nothing to worry about.



Celebrities “getting political” is not a problem in itself. The problem is that most of them don’t start growing their political awareness until they’re already famous, when they’re informing their worldview from inside an elite echo chamber that has a vested interest in preserving the status quo.



Believing there are good billionaires is even dumber than believing there are good US presidents, and believing there are good mainstream media pundits is even dumber than believing there are good billionaires.



The Guardian is the nastiest war propaganda rag in the world, and Simon Tisdall is the nastiest war propagandist at The Guardian.

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No one ever espouses a mainstream political worldview because they have thoroughly examined all the options and sincerely believe that one’s the best. It’s always because they don’t know other political worldviews exist, or aren’t sufficiently familiar with them, or have been propagandized into believing false things about them, or because they work in a career that is advanced by adhering to mainstream political perspectives.

This is true because mainstream political worldviews do not exist to help people and make good things happen, they exist to facilitate plutocracy and empire. Nobody who deeply investigates their nature and contrasts them with alternatives comes away thinking they’re the best, whether they’re someone with left-wing or right-wing sympathies or anywhere in between.

The only reason mainstream politics are mainstream is because powerful manipulators pour a tremendous amount of wealth and energy into making them mainstream. If there were actually a “marketplace of ideas” on that front, mainstream politics would die.



The empire still fears the public. If it didn’t it wouldn’t bother rolling out so much propaganda ahead of all its depraved actions — it would just act. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they’re still afraid of what we’ll do to them if we decide we don’t consent.

Just something I think is worth calling to mind once in a while.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/07/19 ... ve-matrix/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sun Aug 28, 2022 2:12 pm

AUTOCRACY OF AN EMPIRE IN DECLINE
Maria Fernanda Barrett

Aug 26, 2022 , 2:39 p.m.

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You have to get rid of old paradigms to understand that the United States does not need a greater military victory than to generate chaos, disunity and fragmentation of the countries that are not subordinate to it (Photo: File)

No one can expect an empire to collapse without shaking history, much less when that empire has concentrated economic and military power in an unprecedented way, in an almost totally globalized world.

The United States, as the head of the capitalist empire, has managed to concentrate the world economy, build the most powerful military force, dominate the largest integration organizations that are supposed to be multilateral, and in turn has condensed the power of the increasingly cartelized media corporations to your favour.

It is a monstrously consolidated power in forty-five years after the war in a bipolar world and in more than three decades of unipolarism, made to measure.

If no empire before had achieved so much power over the rest of humanity, it is almost absurd that we should be surprised by the earthquakes that cause such a gigantic fall.

The United States and its imperialist army, NATO, are leading the entire world into an endless war to defend the historic achievement of having managed to sustain for three decades that world dominated by it, in which all peoples, even their own, are potential victims of their multidimensional attacks and "target audience" of their psychological and communicational operations.

It is necessary to get rid of old paradigms to understand that the United States does not need a greater military victory than to generate chaos, disunity and fragmentation of the countries that are not subordinate to it and, also, of the peoples who, beyond their own governments , dare to rebel against their interests, because this wounded paper tiger has long learned to consolidate itself in the chaos of others.

THE VIOLENCE UNLEASHED BY THE UNIPOLAR WORLD
To briefly summarize the analysis that we have repeatedly made about what is happening in Ukraine today, we would say that this country is the stage where a war is being waged by the United States and NATO against Russia, whose strategic objective is to prevent the consolidation of the world multipolar to sustain its absolute hegemonic power. It has decided to start this war by indirectly attacking, of course, the third strongest power which, along with China, is the most important threat to its hegemony in economic, military, cultural and, therefore, also political terms.

By weakening the third power, it will be able to focus on its main objective, which is finally China. If the Asian giant is also involved in an armed conflict, the violence that this country exerts on others that refuse to submit to the United States would quickly increase. That is, the insubordinate countries of Western Asia led by Iran and those of Our America led by Cuba and Venezuela.

With this conflict on the Russian borders, moreover, the United States is recovering its economic and military power over Europe, which was already beginning to show signs of sovereignty. The result is a Ukraine devastated and traumatized by war, one of the three largest powers in the world busy resolving a conflict without unleashing all its military power so as not to escalate violence in a country so territorially and culturally close, while It deals with an unusual battery of economic sanctions and media censorship.

A Europe waging a war by order in its own field, increasingly indebted and beginning to feel the ravages of the lack of fuel and food for subordinating itself to the head of NATO.

Furthermore, this conflict has already begun to have an impact on the ecological situation of that region, by returning to the massive use of coal, and with the latent danger of a nuclear war that seeks to camouflage itself behind the curtain of an accident, bombing nuclear facilities, to avoid a direct Russian response to North America, which would obviously affect Our America as well.

THE MOST RECENT ATTACKS AGAINST CHINA AS A STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE
The United States, through the operations of its corporations such as Lokheed Martin -the largest military corporation on the planet-, its unilateral coercive measures disguised as sanctions, open political actions such as Nancy Pelosi's visit, intends to use Taiwan in the same So it is using Ukraine, fueling an outsourced conflict against China and continuing to put pressure on alleged internal conflicts in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

In his book Multipolar Geopolitics , the Minister of People's Power for the Defense of Venezuela, General in Chief Vladimir Padrino López, warns that "In the Thucydides Escalation, towards tripolarity we manifest what we will soon see when the western zone of China, co-inhabited by a Muslim population called the Uyghur ethnic group, begins to disturb the stability of the circuit to prevent the retaking of the old Silk Road ", and further explains that this occurs in the context of a repositioning of Western forces in the Indonesian region. peaceful.

THE ROLE OF MEDIA CORPORATIONS AND NGOS IN JUSTIFYING INTERFERENCE
If we have learned anything in Venezuela, it is the importance of media corporations and supposedly non-governmental organizations, within multidimensional imperialist wars, which prepare the ground to justify interference and seek to legitimize lawfares and all kinds of unilateral, extraterritorial and violating actions. of international law with which the United States interferes in the internal affairs of all the countries of the world, uses international organizations at will, carries out robberies and looting such as those of Venezuelan gold, oil, the Citgo and Monómeros companies, and more recently, the Emtrasur plane, while manipulating world public opinion in favor of his actions.


Obviously, all these dimensions of the war are being applied against China as well. Building on the warning made by the General-in-Chief, we must now turn our attention to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act , which extends import bans on products manufactured in that region, primarily cotton. This ban has already had consequences for the textile sector throughout the world and has had an impact on the internal economy of the region, that is, on the very Uyghur people it claims to defend.

It is about 7 million farmers dedicated to cotton production, whose livelihood is put at risk by this arbitrary measure. Which shows that it is the pursuit of economic actions to undermine the growing Chinese economy, and not a sincere concern for human rights, that motivates this type of action on the part of the United States.

As is also the case in Venezuela, hitting the population with coercive measures that take the form of blockades but that the pro-imperialist narrative calls "sanctions" has become their modus operandi. Import bans are issued to the United States and against political leaders of the country, and finally they are extended to third countries that are threatened with similar measures if they do not support said blockade, with which the full weight of the economic consequences of these measures fall on the shoulders of the peoples and violate their fundamental rights.

For this reason, "During the recently concluded 46th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Cuba issued a joint statement on behalf of 64 countries in which it urges the relevant countries to stop interfering in China's internal affairs through of handling Xinjiang-related issues, to refrain from making baseless accusations against China for political reasons, and to stop curbing the development of developing countries under the guise of human rights." In which, among other things, the double standards of Western powers when it comes to defending human rights were denounced.

It is no coincidence that this interventionist Law was also introduced in 2020 by Senator Marco Rubio, a staunch enemy of Cuba and Venezuela. Finally, this Law was sanctioned by Joe Biden at the end of December 2021 and entered into force on June 21, 2022.

Nor is it by chance that in this type of law they hide behind the speech of the supposed defense of human rights and that for this they have Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among other organizations that without half measures we can describe as mercenary organizations that cover up and they seek to legitimize US interference, while being timid, deaf and even mute, when it comes to denouncing the many violations of fundamental rights within the United States and NATO countries. Much less do they dare to denounce the massive violations of human rights that this interference generates in the countries of the Global South.

But, without a doubt, the most worrying thing of all is how world public opinion is being manipulated by these large media corporations, increasingly overcrowded through social networks and conditioned by the algorithms of an artificial intelligence that learns to control us with each internet search.

The empire of phobias , which has been the promoter of Islamophobia, Russophobia and Sinophobia, continues in its attempt to expand and safeguard its hegemony, imposing war and sowing chaos. The fight for the multipolar world led by China and Russia is also accompanied by Iran, Syria, Palestine, Cuba and, of course, Venezuela, among other countries in the world that refuse to surrender their sovereignty and mortgage their right to self-determination. Because only in a shared world will that " fundamental historical construction to be able to fully develop" which is peace, be possible.

In that same book, General Padrino López brilliantly affirms that "the peace equation will always be negotiated and it is assumed that whoever sits at that table with greater power will obtain greater revenues and benefits, which is why power is the resource unpostponable to conquer".

The construction of that power does not pass only through military preparation and economic development, it implies, in principle, achieving the unity of the Peoples in the struggle for the multipolar and pluricentric world, which requires a "public opinion" capable of revealing and confronting the communicational war led by media cartels and their entertainment industry.

As long as it continues to be accepted that the United States destroys international law in the name of its own laws, imposes wars in the name of peace, violates sovereignties in the name of freedom, impoverishes our peoples in the name of labor rights, and attacks our democracies in name of their liberal model of democracy, we will continue to be weak and, to paraphrase Bolívar, we will be "blind instruments of our own destruction".

If US interference ends up weakening China and Russia, all of humanity runs the risk of ending up submerged in the most absolute autocracy of imperialism. The risk facing the world at this historical moment is of such magnitude, but for all that has been said here, the opportunity is of the same size.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/au ... decadencia

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Sep 26, 2022 2:58 pm

<snip>

Who Is Leading the United States to War?
Deborah Veneziale


The world is sensing the United States’ growing rapacious intent for war.1 Amid the development of the Ukraine crisis, the United States and NATO have been attempting to escalate their proxy war with Russia while continuing to intensify their siege and provocations against China. This intent to go to war was on display during the May 15, 2022 segment of NBC’s Meet the Press, which simulated a U.S. war against China.2 It should be noted that this “war game” was organized by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a prominent Washington, D.C., think tank that is funded by the U.S. and allied governments, including the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and an array of U.S. military and technology companies such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.3

This simulation is in line with other alarming signals toward war from both Congress and the Pentagon. On April 5, Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, made a case before Congress that Russia and China pose nuclear threats to the United States, claiming that China is likely to use nuclear coercion for its own benefit.4 Shortly thereafter, on April 14, a bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers visited Taiwan. On May 5, South Korea announced that it had joined a cyber defense organization under NATO. In June, at its annual summit, NATO named Russia its “most significant and direct threat” and singled out China as a “challenge [to] our interests”. Furthermore, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand participated in the summit for the first time, which suggests the possibility that an Asian branch may be formed in the future. Finally, on August 2, in a blatant provocation of Beijing, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi—the third-highest ranking official in the Biden administration—visited Taiwan, escorted by the U.S. Air Force.5

In the face of the Biden administration’s aggressive foreign policy, one can’t help but wonder: among the U.S. ruling elite, who is advocating war? Is there a mechanism to curb such belligerence in the country?

This article comes to three conclusions. First, in the Biden administration, two elite foreign policy groups that used to compete against each other—liberal hawks and neoconservatives—have merged strategically, forming the most important foreign policy consensus within the country’s elite echelon since 1948 and bringing U.S. war policy to a new level. Second, in consideration of its long-term interests, the big bourgeoisie in the United States has reached a consensus that China is a strategic rival, and it has established solid support for this foreign policy. Third, the so-called democratic institutions of checks and balances are completely incapable of restraining this belligerent policy from spreading due to the design of the U.S. Constitution, the expansion of far-right forces, and the sheer monetization of elections.



The Merging of Belligerent Foreign Policy Elites

Early representatives of U.S. liberal interventionism included Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, whose ideological roots can be traced back to Woodrow Wilson’s notion that America should stand on the world stage fighting for democracy. The invasion of Vietnam was guided by this ideology.

After the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, the Democratic Party temporarily reduced calls for intervention as part of its foreign policy. However, Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (also known at the time as “the senator from Boeing”), a liberal hawk, joined with other anti-communists and staunch interventionists, helping to inspire the neoconservative movement. The neoconservatives, including a number of Jackson’s supporters and former staffers, supported Republican Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s because of his commitment to confront alleged Soviet expansionism.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of U.S. unilateralism, the neoconservatives entered the mainstream in U.S. foreign policy with their thought leader, Paul Wolfowitz, who had been a former aide to Henry Jackson. In 1992, just a few months after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of defense for policy, introduced his Defense Policy Guidance, which explicitly advocated for the United States to maintain a permanent unipolar position. This would be realized, he explained, through the expansion of U.S. military power into the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence and along all its perimeters with the object of preventing the reemergence of Russia as a great power. The U.S.-led unipolar strategy, implemented through the projection of military force, guided the foreign policies of George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, as well as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The U.S. was able to launch the first Gulf War in large part due to Soviet weakness. This was followed by the U.S. and NATO’s military dismemberment of Yugoslavia. After 9/11, the Bush Jr. administration’s foreign policy was completely dominated by the neoconservatives, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

While both liberal hawks and neoconservatives have ardently advocated for foreign military interventions, historically there have been two important differences between them. First, liberal hawks tended to believe that the United States should influence the United Nations and other international institutions to carry out military intervention, while neoconservatives tended to ignore multilateral institutions. Second, liberal hawks sought to lead military interventions alongside Western allies, while neoconservatives were more willing to conduct unilateral military operations and flagrantly violate international law. As Niall Ferguson, a historian at Harvard University, put it, the neoconservatives were happy to accept the title of the American Empire and unilaterally decide to attack any country as the world’s hegemonic power.6

Although Republicans and Democrats have historically developed their own policy and advocacy institutions, it is a misconception to think that they have distinct approaches to foreign policy strategy. It is true that think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation are major neoconservative strongholds that have leaned toward Republican policy, while others such as the Brookings Institution and the later established CNAS have been home to more pro-Democratic liberal hawks. However, members of both parties have worked in each of these organizations, with differences centering around specific policy proposals, not partisan affiliation. In reality, behind the White House and Congress, a bipartisan policy planning network consisting of nonprofit foundations, universities, think tanks, research groups, and other institutions collectively shape the agendas of corporations and capitalists into policy proposals and reports.

Another common misconception is that the so-called progressive side of liberalism will promote social development, provide international assistance, and limit military spending. However, the neoliberal period, which began in the mid-1970s, has been characterized by the state’s subordination to market forces and austerity in social spending in areas such as healthcare, food assistance, and education, all while encouraging unlimited military spending, severely damaging the quality of life for the vast majority of the population. Both Republicans and Democrats follow the principles of neoliberalism, as exemplified by Biden’s annual budget for 2022, which includes a 4 percent increase in military spending, and the fact that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, $1.7 trillion of the $5 trillion that the U.S. government provided in stimulus funding went directly into the pockets of corporations.7 Neoliberalism has had a particularly devastating impact in the Global South, where it has dragged developing countries into debt traps and coerced them into endless debt payments to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In the field of foreign policy, the most influential U.S. think tank since the Second World War has been the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which is funded by an array of ruling class sources. Founder-level corporate members of the council include leaders in energy (Chevron, ExxonMobil, Hess, Tellurian), finance (Bank of America, BlackRock, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Moody’s, Nasdaq), technology (Accenture, Apple, AT&T, Cisco), and the internet (Google, Meta), among other sectors, and the CFR’s current board includes Richard Haass, Bush Sr.’s principal adviser on the Middle East, and Ashton Carter, Obama’s secretary of defense. The German magazine Der Spiegel described the CFR as “the most influential private institution in the United States and the Western world” and “the politburo for capitalism,” while Richard Harwood, former senior editor and ombudsman at The Washington Post, called the council and its members “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States.”8 The CFR’s policy proposals reflect the long-term strategic thinking of the U.S. bourgeoisie, as seen by its proposal to “strengthen U.S.-Japan coordination in response to the Taiwan issue” in January 2022, ahead of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August of the same year.

Regardless of which party’s candidates the staffers of these various institutions support in the elections, this long-standing bipartisan, collaborative network has maintained consistent foreign policy in Washington. This network promotes a U.S. supremacist worldview that denies other countries’ right to be involved in international affairs, an ideology dating back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine that proclaimed U.S. domination over the entire Western hemisphere. Today’s U.S. foreign policy elite has extended the doctrine’s application from the Americas to the entire world. Cross-party synergy and party switching are common for this group of foreign policy makers, which is closely tied to the ruling capitalist class and its surrogates within the political power elite that control U.S. foreign policy, as well as to the Deep State (the intelligence services together with the military).

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Process of policy formation, from Who Rules America? by William Domhoff.

At the turn of the century, neoconservatives, who gathered in the Republican Party, were more concerned with the disintegration and denuclearization of Russia than they were with China. Around 2008, however, forces within the U.S. political elite began to realize that China’s economy would continue its strong rise and that its future leaders would not cave to U.S. influence; there would be no Chinese equivalent of Gorbachev or Yeltsin. Beginning in this period, the neoconservatives began to take an entirely confrontational approach to China and pursue containment. At the same time, some pro-Democratic liberal hawks founded CNAS, and Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, led the development and implementation of the Pivot to Asia, a strategic shift in U.S. foreign policy that was applauded by the neoconservatives, who were still in the Republican camp at the time. Clinton was hailed as a “strong voice” by Max Boot, a political commentator and senior fellow at CFR, who, in 2003, wrote that, “[g]iven the historical baggage that ‘imperialism’ carries, there’s no need for the U.S. government to embrace the term. But it should definitely embrace the practice.”9 Today, extending NATO to Ukraine and confronting Russia remains a priority for neoconservatives and liberal hawks alike. Both groups disagree with the realists who propose a détente with Russia in order to strengthen the confrontation with China.

However, the election of Trump in 2016 briefly created turbulence in the CFR consensus. As John Bellamy Foster wrote in Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce, the former president rose to power partly through the mobilization of a neofascist movement based in the white lower-middle class.10 Only a small number of people in the big capital elite supported him initially. Among them were Dick Uihlein, the owner of the shipping giant Uline; Bernie Marcus, the founder of the building materials retailer Home Depot; Robert Mercer, an investor in the far-right media outlet Breitbart News Network; and Timothy Mellon, grandson of the banking tycoon Andrew Mellon. Trump’s tendency to shrink engagement in global affairs—as seen with the withdrawal of troops from Syria and the initiation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan as well as diplomatic contact with North Korea—favored the short-term interests of the lower and middle bourgeoisie and won the support of foreign policy realists, including Henry Kissinger, but it upset the neoconservatives. A group of elite neoconservatives played a major role in the campaign against Trump, with some 300 officials who had supported the Bush administration backing the Democratic Party in the 2020 election. This included the aforementioned Boot, who has become a thought leader on foreign policy and has had a strong impact on the Biden administration.

Under Biden, the CFR consensus resumed, and the neoconservatives and liberal hawks have become completely aligned on the country’s strategic orientation. Their joint awareness of China’s rise has fostered a unity between these two groups unseen in decades. This unity is based on the theory of international affairs that stipulates that the United States should actively intervene in other countries’ politics, make every effort to promote “freedom and democracy,” crack down on those states that challenge Western economic and military dominance, remove unwanted governments, and secure global hegemony by all means—with Russia and China as its primary targets. In May 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken (who previously served as deputy secretary of state under Obama) declared that the U.S. would defend an ambiguous “rules-based international order,” a term that refers to U.S.-dominated international and security organizations rather than broader UN-based institutions. Blinken’s stance suggests that, under the Biden administration, liberal hawks have officially forsaken the pretense of following the UN or other international multilateral organizations unless they bow to U.S. diktat.

In 2019, the prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan co-authored an article with Antony Blinken urging the United States to abandon Trump’s America First policy. They called for the containment (i.e., siege and weakening) of Russia and China and proposed a policy of “preventive diplomacy and deterrence” against America’s adversaries, that is, troops and tanks wherever it is deemed necessary.11 Incidentally, Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, served as the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration. Nuland played a key role in organizing and supporting the 2014 color revolution/coup in Ukraine and has boasted about the billions of dollars the United States has spent to “promote democracy” in the country.12 She is currently serving as undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Biden administration, the third highest position in the State Department after Secretary Blinken and Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman. She is also a spiritual heir to her mentor, the liberal hawk leader Madeleine Albright.

The hawkish orientation espoused by Kagan and Blinken was taken a step further by NATO’s think tank, the Atlantic Council, which has advocated for nuclear brinkmanship. In February, Matthew Kroenig, the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Snowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, argued for the consideration of the U.S.’s preemptive use of “tactical” nuclear weapons.13

From this small coterie of warmongers, one can easily detect the deep integration of two elite foreign affairs groups, both of which are the real drivers of the Ukraine crisis. The evolution of this crisis reveals the following set of tactics adopted by this belligerent clique:

strengthening U.S. leadership over NATO, using the military alliance (rather than the UN) as the primary mechanism for foreign intervention;
provoking a so-called adversary to war by refusing to recognize its claim to sovereignty and security over sensitive regions;
planning the use of tactical nuclear weapons and conducting a “limited nuclear war” in or around the so-called adversary’s territory; and
imposing hybrid warfare in order to weaken and subvert the adversary through unilateral coercive measures and combining economic sanctions with financial, informational, propagandistic, and cultural measures along with a color revolution, cyberwarfare, lawfare, and other tactics.
If the desired results are achieved in Ukraine, the same strategy will undoubtedly be replicated in the Western Pacific.

Strategic alignment does not mean that policy elites are not divided on other issues that they deem to be of lesser importance, such as climate change. Even on this matter, however, the United States is demanding that Europe stop importing natural gas from Russia. John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, is noncommittal about the potential negative environmental impacts of such a move, in part because the United States wants to replace Russian gas sales in Europe with its own.

In recent years, progressive forces around the world have launched several international campaigns to voice their concerns about the aggressive global strategy being pursued by the U.S., often using the term “New Cold War.” However, the narratives put forth at times underestimate the depravity of some aspects of current U.S. foreign policy. The “Old Cold War” with the Soviet Union followed certain rules and bottom lines: the United States used a variety of political and economic means to exert pressure and seek to subvert the Soviet state, and the two sides acknowledged one another’s scope of interests and security needs. However, the U.S. did not try to change the national boundaries of nuclear adversaries. This is not the case today, as seen by The Wall Street Journal’s open declaration that the United States should demonstrate its ability to win a nuclear war, a stance which is undergirded by the foreign policy elite’s claim that Ukraine and Taiwan must be protected as they are both strategic locations within the Western military perimeter.14 Even the Cold War leader Kissinger has expressed concern and opposition to current U.S. foreign policy, arguing that the correct strategy is to divide China and Russia and warning that there will be dangerous consequences if the U.S. directly pursues war against these two nuclear-armed states simultaneously.



The U.S. Bourgeoisie Prepares for War Against China

Washington has sought to economically decouple the United States from China through trade and technology wars, a process that was initiated by the Trump administration and has continued under Biden’s leadership. However, this policy has spurred unintended consequences. On the one hand, due to the formation of global supply chains, U.S. and European manufacturing industries rely heavily on imports from China, and Biden has faced domestic opposition with calls to scale back trade war tariffs in order to ease the enormous pressure of inflation in the United States. On the other hand, although China did not initiate economic decoupling, the pressure of the trade and technology wars has promoted the development of the “internal grand circulation” within the country (reducing reliance on exports and relying more on domestic consumption). Since the pandemic, there has been a superficial phased increase in the trade of merchandise between the U.S. and China.

It must be noted, however, that there is a change underway in the basic logic of U.S. relations with China: the U.S. bourgeoisie has been tightening its alliance against China and supporting the bellicose strategy of Washington. This situation stems from both economic and ideological factors. For one, GDP figures of the U.S. and other countries in the West mask the contributions made by labor in factories in the Global South. For example, Apple’s highly profitable sales in the United States appear in the U.S.’s GDP numbers, but the actual source of their high returns is the surplus created by the massively efficient and low-cost advanced productive labor force in Shenzhen, Chongqing, and other cities in China where Foxconn factories are located.15 China has come a long way from the era of large factories with low-paid unskilled workers and has developed an extremely sophisticated industrial, logistical, and societal infrastructure that, as of 2019, accounted for 28.7 percent of global manufacturing.16 Moving the whole supply chain from China to India or Mexico would be a decades-long process and cannot be based on just lower wages.

Few sectors of the U.S. economy depend heavily on the local Chinese market for sales, with U.S. chipmakers being the exception. Major firms such as Boeing, Caterpillar, General Motors, Starbucks, Nike, Ford, and Apple (at 17 percent) obtain less than 25 percent of their revenue from China.17 The total revenue of S&P 500 companies is $14 trillion, no more than 5 percent of which is related to sales inside China.18 U.S. CEOs are unlikely to oppose the direction of U.S. foreign policy on China, as they are not being presented with a clear path to increase their long-term access to China’s growing internal market. This attitude was on display during Disney’s May 2022 earnings call when CEO Bob Chapek expressed confidence in the company’s success even without access to China’s market.19 This approach toward China is visible across key U.S. industries:

Tech/internet. Nine of the top ten richest Americans are in the tech/internet industry, the zeitgeist of our time, with the partial exception of Elon Musk, the CEO of the electric automobile manufacturer Tesla, whose first pot of gold also came from the internet industry. Compared to the lists of the richest Americans from past decades, those from traditional sectors such as manufacturing, banking, and oil have been overtaken by a rising tech elite, which is steeped in anti-China attitudes due to the difficulties they have faced in penetrating the Chinese market. U.S. tech giants such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook have virtually no market in China, while companies like Apple and Microsoft face increasing difficulties. In the past decade, the Chinese technology and telecommunications corporation Huawei surpassed Apple in terms of market share within China, only for Apple to regain the top spot due to U.S. sanctions, which banned the sale of semiconductor chips—a key component in smartphones—to Huawei. The Chinese government is reportedly embracing indigenous Linux and Office Productivity systems to replace Microsoft Windows and Office software. Traditional IT companies such as IBM, Oracle, and EMC (collectively referred to as IOE) have long been marginalized in the Chinese market by the Alibaba-driven de-IOE wave, which seeks to replace IBM servers, Oracle databases, and EMC storage devices with indigenous and open-source solutions. U.S. tech giants yearn for a change to the political system in China that would open the door to the country’s massive market, and major actors in this sector are actively working to advance Washington’s hostile foreign policy. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and executive chairman of Google, led the establishment of the U.S. government’s Defense Innovation Unit in 2016 and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence in 2018. His fervent promotion of the “China Threat” theory reflects the prevailing opinion of the U.S. tech community, which also shapes public discourse. Twitter and Facebook have partnered with U.S. and Western governments to increasingly censor criticisms of their foreign policy and influence discussion around key issues—such as the pandemic, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang—in the name of combatting disinformation campaigns allegedly launched by China and other so-called adversaries.

Manufacturing. U.S. manufacturing remains dependent on Chinese production capacity. Consistent investment and technological innovation in U.S. manufacturing were effectively abandoned during the neoliberal period, and, despite Obama’s and Trump’s calls to near-shore manufacturing back to North America, little has been accomplished in this regard. However, U.S. manufacturing investments in China have decreased in recent years, with the notable exception of Tesla’s mega-factory in Shanghai. Even in this case, however, it is important to note that Elon Musk has won numerous U.S. government and military procurement contracts through his space exploration firm SpaceX, whose Starlink satellite system was criticized by China for its “close encounters” with the Chinese space station on two occasions in 2021. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army warned that the U.S. may seek to militarize the Starlink system. The deployment of Starlink’s services in Ukraine during the war is evidence of this dynamic. Musk’s potential acquisition of Twitter would be unlikely to change the company’s relationship with U.S. and Western governments and orientation toward China and Russia.

Finance. The U.S. financial services industry has long expected China’s capital markets to open further to them, their ultimate hope being regime change in China that would lead the country to an outright neoliberal path. The anti-Chinese attitude of the influential Hungarian-born U.S. financial magnate and philanthropist George Soros is well known. In January 2022, Soros tweeted that “China’s Xi Jinping is the greatest threat that open societies face today.”20 These comments came after Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, declared in November 2021 that the multinational bank would outlive the Communist Party of China (though he later apologized for this comment and said he was joking). Dimon also implied that China would suffer a heavy military strike if it attempted to reunify Taiwan, a threat for which made no apology.21 This hostile attitude is a response to the fact that China’s capital markets are not advancing in the direction that Wall Street would prefer, as evidenced by the Chinese government strengthening capital controls and delisting a series of Chinese stocks from the U.S. stock exchange. At the investing conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting for 2022, Charlie Munger, vice chairman of the company, stated that China was still “worth” the investment. Even in this case, however, Munger accepted the premise of his interviewer, who characterized the Chinese government as an “authoritarian regime” that commits “human rights violations.” For Munger, China is only worth the extra risk because one can invest in better businesses at lower prices.

Retail and consumer sectors. U.S. retail and consumer industries have long been squeezed by their Chinese competitors. In March 2021, Nike and other companies boycotted Xinjiang cotton on the false grounds of forced labor. Shortly thereafter, Nike released an advertisement that was criticized for promoting racist stereotypes about Chinese people, resulting in a further loss of its market share, which had already begun to be outflanked by the Chinese brand Anta.

Furthermore, there is a significant disconnect between the two countries’ cultural and entertainment industries, with domestically produced movies accounting for 85 percent of the Chinese box office in 2021. Marvel superhero movies, once popular among Chinese filmgoers, have been unable to enter the Chinese market due to ideological concerns, with zero box office takings in China in 2021. The recent Marvel production Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness yet again features anti-Chinese scenes, including a reference to the far-right, anti-government newspaper The Epoch Times. It has not been screened in China. These cases reflect U.S. companies’ trade-offs between commercial interests—reaching the Chinese consumer market—and political ideology—opposing the Chinese political system.



The U.S. Military-Indus­­trial Complex and the Drive for War

The U.S. military-industrial complex plays a special role in galvanizing cooperation between strategic economic, technological, political, and military sectors toward imperialist interests. In 2021, the top six military contractors in the world—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics—had combined sales of over $128 billion to the U.S. government.22 Big Tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Palantir (founded by the extremist Peter Thiel) have formed close bonds with the U.S. military, signing thousands of contracts worth tens of billion dollars in recent decades.23 The tech industry plays the strategic role of collecting data in the vast U.S. intelligence empire and is at the center of U.S. soft-power media and social media hegemony, ensuring digital domination over the majority of the Global South. As such, this sector has become immune from meaningful regulation or threats of de-monopolization.

The U.S. drive for military supremacy leads to spending sprees in the areas of weapons, computer technology (silicon chips, in particular), advanced communications (including satellite cyber warfare), and biotechnology. The U.S. government has officially requested $813 billion for the military as part of its 2023 budget (which does not factor in additional military spending that is disguised in other sections of the overall budget), and the Pentagon claims it will need at least $7 trillion in appropriations over the next ten years.24

The privatization of the state under neoliberalism has led to the development of a revolving door between the U.S. government and the private sector over the past four decades. The state has become a vehicle for high level government officials including congresspersons, senators, policy and security advisors, cabinet members, colonels, generals, and presidents from both parties to become multi-millionaires by leveraging their political insider status with private interest groups.25 Within governmental bureaucracy, the phrase “national security” opens the spigot for personal and corporate greed and radical military expansion even wider. Under this prevalent form of First World, legalized corruption, firms often tender payoffs to officials after they leave public office. These legal bribes are essentially payments in arrears for services granted while in office. For example, upon leaving office, former public officials are frequently hired as paid employees, board members, or advisors with the same firms that they had previously advocated on behalf of, provided favorable voting for, or awarded government contracts to as public officials.26 Some prominent examples of this pervasive dynamic include the following:

Bill Clinton claims to have been $16 million dollars in debt when he left the White House in 2001, but, by 2021, he was worth an estimated $80 million.27
With shocking impunity, at least 85 of the 154 people from private interest groups who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Hillary Clinton while she led the State Department under President Obama donated a combined $156 million to the Clinton Foundation.28
James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a retired four-star general, former secretary of defense under Trump, and former board member of CNAS, had a net worth of $7 million in 2018, five years after his “retirement” from the military. This was earned through significant payments from a wide list of military contractors and included $600,000 to $1.25 million in stock and options in the major defense contractor General Dynamics.29
Lloyd Austin, the secretary of defense under President Biden, formerly served on the board of directors of several military-industrial companies such as United Technologies and Raytheon Technologies. Austin earned the majority of his $7 million net worth after “retiring” as a four-star general.30
Between 2009 and 2011, over 70 percent of top U.S. generals worked for military contractors after retiring from their position. Generals also double dip by simultaneously receiving compensation from the Pentagon and payments from private military contractors.31 In 2016 alone, nearly 100 U.S. military officers went throug­h the revolving door between the government and private military contractors, including 25 generals, 9 admirals, 43 lieutenant generals, and 23 vice admirals.32

During the Trump administration, many Obama-era officials moved to the private sector, consulting and advising the world’s largest corporations, only to return to the White House under Biden. In a staggering display of this revolving door, the Biden administration has appointed more than 15 senior officials from the corporate consultancy firm WestExec Advisors, which was founded in 2017 by a team of former Obama administration officials and claims to provide “unparalleled geopolitical risk analysis” to its clients (including “Managing China-Related Risk in an Era of Strategic Competition”).33 The firm facilitates cooperation between Big Tech and the U.S. military, with clients including Boeing, Palantir, Google, Facebook, Uber, AT&T, the drone surveillance company Shield AI, and the Israeli artificial intelligence firm Windward. WestExec alumni working in the Biden administration include Secretary of State Blinken, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Deputy Director of the CIA David Cohen, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner, and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki.34

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The WestExec to Biden administration pipeline, part one. Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept. 35

The Weakening of Domestic Resistance to U.S. Militarism

In 1973, the United States abolished military service conscription, or what was known as the draft, after which the U.S. military cleverly and misleadingly referred to itself as an all-volunteer army. This was done to reduce domestic opposition to U.S. wars abroad, especially from the children of propertied and middle-class families who had become vocal against the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam. Although the measure was justified in the name of selecting more professional and dedicated soldiers, in reality, the bourgeoisie sought to prey upon the economic vulnerabilities of poorer working-class families, who they recruited into service through offers of technical training and secure earnings. Technological advances in warfare allowed the United States to simultaneously increase its capacity to kill civilians and enemy combatants in invaded countries while reducing the death rate of U.S. soldiers. For example, in the $2.2 trillion war against Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, only 2,442—1 percent—of the 241,000 people killed (including over 71,000 civilians) were U.S. military personnel.36 The reduction in U.S. death tolls has weakened the domestic emotional connection to U.S. war campaigns, which has further been blunted by the rise of private military contractors. By the mid-2010s, it was estimated that nearly half of the U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were employed by private military contractors. 37 In 2016, the world’s largest private military contractor, ACADEMI (initially founded by Erik Prince as Blackwater) was purchased by the world’s largest private equity firm, Apollo, for an estimated $1 billion.38 Far from an all-volunteer army, today, it is increasingly apt to describe the U.S. military as an all-mercenary army.

The United States is further emboldened in its warmongering by the fact that, while it has invaded or participated in military operations in over a hundred countries, it has never been invaded or experienced large-scale civilian casualties at the hands of foreign governments. The psychology of U.S. exceptionalism is shaped by the fact that the current generation of political elites largely grew up after the end of the Cold War, a period defined as the so-called “end of history”, when their country appeared to be invincible. The United States had not experienced a serious challenger either abroad or at home until the rise of China. As a result, this elite is particularly ahistorical in its worldview, seized by delusions of grandeur, and consequently feels unconstrained—an extremely dangerous combination.

The military-industrial complex, composed of generals, politicians, tech companies, and private military contractors, is pursuing a massive expansion of U.S. military capacity. Today, nearly all in Washington use China as well as Russia as their pretext for this build up. Meanwhile, many of them have committed or supported war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.

Few influential individual capitalists in the United States are willing to openly stand against the chorus demonizing China, and those who do are disciplined or ostracized. One rarely comes across publicly dissenting views or calls for restraint in the op-ed sections of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Michael Bloomberg was heavily criticized for being “soft” on China after he stated that the Communist Party was responsive to the public and refused to label President Xi Jinping as a dictator. Bloomberg appears to have been successfully disciplined; under the Biden administration, he joined the war hysteria and was named chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board in February 2022. The global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which has favored greater economic engagement with China, has faced increasing criticism for these views, being smeared by The New York Times as “help[ing] raise the stature of authoritarian and corrupt governments across the globe.”39 Consequently, McKinsey’s influence in U.S. business circles has been greatly weakened. Though a small number of figures—such as Ray Dalio, billionaire investor and founder of Bridgewater Associates—continue to express optimism about U.S.-China relations, they are outliers.

More critically, those in the current upper echelon of the U.S. bourgeois elite have diversified their investments across a slew of industries, enabling them to overcome the narrow, short-term economic interests of any one industry and to align with the “big picture” of U.S. strategy. In contrast to millionaires of generations past who were focused on a single industry, the billionaires of today have developed a more shared consciousness and can envision the major long-term returns from a fully liberalized Chinese market that would follow the overthrow of the Chinese state. Consequently, these billionaires are motivated to support the U.S. containment of China despite the short-term losses they might suffer as a result. As detailed above, this big bourgeoisie funds a large swathe of think tanks and policy groups through non-profit foundations, shaping U.S. policy discussions and proposals.

Among the upper-middle-class elite, there is a small group of far-right libertarian isolationists mainly composed of intellectuals and represented by the Cato Institute. This political network speaks out against the U.S. Federal Reserve System and foreign intervention and is opposed to the U.S.’s role in Ukraine. However, it is marginalized in the U.S. foreign policy arena and does not wield much influence.

As Karl Marx once noted, capitalists have always been a “band of warring brothers.” This band maintains a modern state that has a massive, permanent body of armed men and women, intelligence functionaries, and spies. In 2015, 4.3 million individuals in the United States had security clearance to access “confidential”, “secret”, or “top secret” government material.40 Regardless of any electoral result, this state apparatus is ultimately able to exert its dominance and guide U.S. foreign policy, as evidenced during the Trump administration’s inability to implement its own foreign policy.



The Rise of the Far Right and the False Nature of Checks and Balances in the U.S. Political System

The hostility of the U.S. ruling bourgeois elite and middle classes toward China has deep, racist roots. Trump’s four years in office coincided with the formation of a united coalition of populist and white supremacist right-wing movements known as the Alt-Right. Stephen Bannon, a mouthpiece of this movement, is a former chairman of the white supremacist website Breitbart News Network and is unsurprisingly one of the most active anti-China campaigners in the United States. The Alt-Right’s support base comes from the lower middle class: mostly white people with annual household incomes of around $75,000. While Bannon and even Trump himself like to boast of the support they get from “the white working class,” their primary support base is in fact the lower middle class—not the working class.

The Republican Party has benefited electorally from the creation of this neofascist voting bloc. The Alt-Right tends to lionize big capitalist personalities and desires upward mobility to join the elite. Meanwhile, this bloc expresses hatred toward both elitist political and cultural leaders for blocking their road to wealth as well as toward the working class. In 1951, the prominent U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills offered the following characterization of the U.S. middle classes:

They are rear guarders. In the shorter run, they will follow the panicky ways of prestige; in the longer run, they will follow the ways of power, for, in the end, prestige is determined by power. In the meantime, on the political marketplace… the new middle classes are up for sale; whoever seems respectable enough, strong enough, can probably have them. So far, nobody has made a serious bid.41

The Trump administration directed the lower middle class’s resentment of their deteriorating economic situation toward China. The U.S. economy has never fully recovered from the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, when loose monetary policy enabled big capitalists to reap enormous profits while the working class and the lower middle class suffered great losses. The latter group, angry and frustrated with their situation and in dire need of a spokesperson, was mobilized by Trump to become his key vote bank with the help of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and a New Cold War to suppress China as an opponent in an all-out manner.

Today, hostility toward China has become widespread across the U.S. population. The impression that China is the arch enemy of the free world and the greatest threat to the United States has been emphatically reinforced by mainstream media outlets and internet platforms, while freedom of speech for those who oppose this dangerous trend has been increasingly restricted. Any acknowledgement of Russian and Chinese perspectives or criticism of U.S. foreign policy toward these countries meets strong public criticism. Public opinion in the United States increasingly resembles the McCarthyist period of the 1950s and, in certain ways, the social climate bears disturbing similarities to that of Germany in the early 1930s.

Outsiders often misunderstand the real nature of checks and balances and the separation of powers in the U.S. political system. Unlike the history of European constitutional reforms that were spawned by social revolutionary movements, the U.S. Constitution, which was originally founded by a group of property holders (including slaveholders), was designed from the beginning to protect the rights of private property owners against what they feared could become mob majoritarian rule. To this day, the constitution allows for the dismantling of most traditional bourgeois social and legal rights.

Measures such as the electoral college, which was originally implemented to protect the interests of southern slave-holding and other smaller rural states, were designed to impede the people’s direct vote for president (one person, one vote). This undemocratic system, which is safeguarded by a difficult and onerous process to amend the constitution, resulted in both Bush Jr. and Trump winning the presidency despite receiving fewer votes than their respective opponents. Despite the eventual extension of voting rights to Black people, women, and those without property, voter disenfranchisement continues to this day. As of 2021, 19 states had enacted a total of 34 voter suppression laws that could limit the voting rights of up to 55 million voters in those states.42 Meanwhile, the unelected Supreme Court has the power to overturn voting rights legislation, strike down affirmative action, and allow religious organizations to abridge civil rights.

A 2010 Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United removed limits on private and corporate contributions to elections, making them a contest of financial strength.43 In the 2020 elections, overall spending for the presidential, congressional, and Senate races was $14 billion.44 In addition to financial competition, there is also psychological-technological competition: the persuasive technological tools based on social media, behavioral economics, and Big Data play a huge role in shaping electoral processes. At the same time, these tools are extremely expensive, helping to ensure that politics is a near exclusive game for the rich. In 2015, the median wealth of U.S. senators exceeded $3 million.45 This is hardly a government that is checked and balanced by the people.



Are We Doomed to War?

In 2014, Xi Jinping, shortly after becoming China’s top leader, told then U.S. President Obama that “the broad Pacific Ocean is vast enough to embrace both China and the United States.”46 Rejecting this diplomatic olive branch, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton boasted in an private speech that the United States could call the Pacific “the American Sea” and threatened to “ring China with missile defense.”47 In 2020, the UK’s Center for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) predicted that China would overtake the United States to become the world’s largest economy by 2028, a threshold that haunts the U.S. elite. U.S. foreign policy and public opinion in recent years have fixated on preparations to wage a hot war to contain China before that can take place. The proxy war in Ukraine can be seen as a prelude to this hot war. The ideological mobilization to prepare for war is already in full swing in the United States. The wheels of neofascism are turning, and a new era of McCarthyism has arisen. So-called democratic politics are only a cover for the rule of the bourgeois elite; they will not serve as a braking mechanism for the war machine.

There are 140 million working and poor people in the United States, with 17 million children suffering from hunger—six million more than before the pandemic.48 While a portion of this class does express ideological support for U.S. warmongering policy, this support directly contradicts their interests: the near trillion-dollar military budget comes at the expense of providing funding to guarantee healthcare, education, infrastructure, and other human rights, as well as combating climate change. Historically, progressive groups in the United States such as Black and feminist movements have had a strong spirit of anti-war struggle, and leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X courageously fought to build a wave of domestic resistance to U.S. aggression in Southeast Asia. Sadly, today, some (but not all) progressive leaders in the United States have been unwilling to challenge Washington’s anti-China campaign or, worse, have even become supporters of it.

There are important moral voices in the United States that speak out. However, it must be noted that the few progressive groups opposed to a New Cold War have been vilified for allegedly justifying genocide in Xinjiang. The U.S. political system ruthlessly works to marginalize voices from this section of society.

Although the United States and its allies are aggressively pursuing global military expansion through NATO, the vast majority of the world does not welcome their war making. On March 2, 2022, the UN General Assembly held the 11th emergency special session, and countries which together constitute more than half of the world’s population voted against or abstained from voting on the draft resolution titled “Aggression against Ukraine.” Meanwhile, countries which represent 85 percent of the world’s population have not endorsed the U.S.-led sanctions against Russia.49 Washington’s attempts to escalate and prolong the war and to force a decoupling of Moscow and Beijing will lead to massive economic dislocation, which will bring about sizeable negative reactions to U.S. rule. Even countries like India and Saudi Arabia are deeply concerned about the excesses of the United States in freezing Russian foreign exchange reserves and reinforcing the hegemony of the dollar. Similarly, the presidents of Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala did not attend the Summit of the Americas hosted by the United States in Los Angeles in June 2022 because of the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Resistance to U.S. rule is growing in Latin America. It should be noted, however, that international platforms such as the UN are not actually capable of restraining the United States from waging wars. Washington refuses to be bound by anything but its own rules-based international order.

In the United States, the Biden administration is providing massive military aid to Ukraine to create a protracted war to weaken Russia to the maximum extent possible and bring about regime change. It is also deviating from the spirit of the three Sino-U.S. joint statements and destabilizing the Taiwan Strait in various ways. Though the United States does have great military power, its current economic strength, while immense, is in a perpetual state of decline and crisis.

As John Ross shows in this study, U.S. economic supremacy is waning and may be ended by the Chinese economic juggernaut. In addition, the United States, along with its NATO allies, face multiple profound economic and ecological difficulties. The U.S.-driven war will exacerbate these problems. The war may doom Europe to lower, possibly negative GDP growth, along with inflation and increased and socially useless military spending. The United States has effectively abandoned any pretense of a serious strategy to address climate change, not to mention that its unending pursuit of war has exacerbated the climate catastrophe. And, ironically, despite the domestic political consensus for economic decoupling, U.S. firms continue to increase orders to China—substantive decoupling remains a pipedream.

The United States will not just collapse economically, however; Washington’s drive for war, sanctions, and economic decoupling will continue to damage its own economy and jeopardize the world food supply chain. The resulting global social instability will, in turn, further weaken the U.S. economy and generate even more challenges to its rule, including growing opposition to the hegemony of the dollar.

China’s relatively stable social governance, strong national defense, diplomatic strategy of peace, and resistance to succumbing to U.S. power can, as Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi put it, allow the country to proceed “from a position of strength” and eventually force the United States to give up the illusion that it could go to war with China and win.50 It is in the interests of the Global South that China remain a strong socialist, sovereign state and that it continue to promote alternative policies for global governance such as the concept of “building a community with a shared future for humanity” and the Global Development Initiative. There must be an immediate commitment to reinvigorating viable multilateral projects of the Global South such as BRICS and the Non-Aligned Movement, initiatives in which much of the world shares a common interest. The world population, the vast majority of which is located in Global South, must resist war and call for peace. The United States is not the first empire to overreach with arrogance and hubris, and it, too, will eventually see its power come to an end.

(more)

https://thetricontinental.org/the-unite ... rspective/

Extensive notes at link.
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 13, 2022 2:47 pm

The "old" order and the birth of the "new" one?

Of course, the reference to the order, be it the "old" or the "new", has to do with the current global geopolitical reordering. The "old" is the one that emerged after World War II, hegemonized by the United States, particularly after the implosion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR);

Author: Jorge Casals Llano | internet@granma.cu

september 20, 2022 10:09:42

Image

Of course, the reference to the order, be it the "old" or the "new", has to do with the current global geopolitical reordering. The "old" is the one that emerged after World War II, hegemonized by the United States, particularly after the implosion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR); and the "new" one, the one that is beginning to become more than evident with the response of Russia to the provocations of the United States, the NATO and their allies that led to the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

It also has to do with China's response to the provocations of the once undisputed hegemonic country, when it violated the agreement on the recognition of one China and made official visits to the Chinese territory of Taiwan, first by none other than the third in the U.S. hierarchy, and then, in a new provocation, by U.S. congressmen, with the implicit aim of breaking the 1979 agreement recognizing the existence of one China, which had then opened the doors to globalizing neo-liberalism.

And although the attempt to specify the date of the beginning of the end of the old order (including the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism and globalization) and the beginning of the transition might be controversial, it would not seem to be unwise to place it in the 1990s, due to its symbolism, paradoxically coinciding with the implosion of the USSR. Moreover, and for different reasons, the no less thunderous implosion of Yugoslavia, which took place during the 1990s and culminated in the undeclared war - in violation of the UN Charter and all norms of international law - that ended with the NATO bombing in 1999, causing the death of thousands of civilians.

The beginning of the end could also be placed when, in the 21st century, the very suspicious and never clarified airplane attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, broadcasted live, while the President of the country appeared calmly, reading a publication upside down, but ready to declare his readiness to attack the aggressors "in any dark corner of the world".

There is no doubt that the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the lies to justify it, the enlargement of NATO to include former Soviet countries, the coup d'état in Ukraine and the increase of Nazi followers there, the response of Russia, benefited by the high oil prices as a result of that same war, the rapprochement of Russian and Chinese interests, Putin's warning call in 2007 in the face of attempts by the United States to create a unipolar world, and the attempts of the same country to create a unipolar world, should also be considered signs of the breakdown of the old order - and of the attempts to maintain it. The US attempts to create a unipolar world with the announcements of the creation of an anti-missile shield, supposedly aimed at protecting Europe from possible attacks by North Korea and Iran; the violation of the Minsk agreements, and the return and accession of Crimea to Russia.

And all at the same time as China was undergoing an unstoppable and accelerated economic and scientific and technological development within the framework of globalization. The result of what has been briefly outlined so far is the strengthening of ties between China and Russia, much feared by the renowned American political scientist Henry Kissinger, aware that the USA will not be able to wage a war on two fronts.

It is necessary to recall the above. It was the context in which the world is "de-globalizing" or, as others point out, in which globalization is "becoming regional," which makes it necessary to inquire into the causes that determine the return to a "new" Cold War (regardless of ideologies) and because, as UN Secretary General António Guterres has pointed out, the prospect of a nuclear war is now within the realm of possibility, which puts us on the brink of extermination.

ECONOMICS AND MILITARY CAPABILITY

The decline of US hegemony and its "rules-based order", which has made it dysfunctional, as well as the so-called "representative democracy", which represents the interests of big capital and the oligarchs, and not those of the peoples, is a well-known story; nor shall we refer to the non-existent "economic liberalism", manipulated by the big transnationals, which makes the States impose "sanctions" that turn it into a fallacy.

Let us stop on the present and, as far as possible, on the immediate future, and on the two aspects we consider most important.

The first has to do with the economy, for its capacity to reflect the whole. The first possible thing to observe is the decrease in the participation of the "West" in the generation of the global gross product (although the United States maintains its participation and continues to be the world's leading economic power, a situation which, barring a catastrophe, it will maintain until the end of the present decade).

At the same time and because of the above, the increase in the participation of the so-called emerging countries, particularly the BRICS and among them China (which, if a cataclysm does not occur, would surpass the US economy before the end of the present decade). And all this has been accelerated by the war in Ukraine and the sanctions promoted by the U.S., NATO and the European Union, which have aggravated the aforementioned situation and the inclusion of new members to the BRICS. The shift of the global geopolitical axis towards the Asia-Pacific region is irreversible.

Second in importance is military capability. The vast majority of what can be read on the subject (the Global Firepower 2022 index is an example) combines more than 50 indicators including army size, number of tanks, ships, aircraft, financing, and places the USA in first place, Russia in second and China in third.

To this should be added what Vladimir Putin said in his speech at the opening of the Army2022 defense exhibition: "Russian weapons are years and decades ahead of their foreign counterparts, being far superior in their tactical and technical characteristics," and the latest demonstrations of their efficiency seem to confirm his words.

The U.S. adventure against Taiwan is not just the individual trip of an irresponsible politician, but part of a conscious and determined movement that seeks to destabilize and bring chaos to that region of the world.

The above seems to be confirmed in the Bloomberg article of August 9, on the "war games," which simulate the actions that would take place in a possible confrontation between the United States and China over Taiwan, and its grim consequences. Although the exercise itself is scheduled to end in December, suffice it to quote an excerpt from that article: "The results show that, in most but not all scenarios, Taiwan can repel an invasion. However, the cost will be very high for Taiwan's infrastructure and economy and for U.S. forces in the Pacific."

Even without considering the human losses of the disaster, some latest data show what it would mean immediately: Taiwan today produces 90% of the world's advanced semiconductor chips; mainland China produces 40% and by 2025 is expected to produce 70% of semiconductors.

The summary so far is not very pleasant, and even more so if additional data is added, as the USA and the "West", at best, try to divide the world into opposing blocs and, at worst, to provoke a global confrontation.

The confrontations increasingly impact more nations, which include more and more regional powers such as Turkey and Iran, but also Australia, India or Japan. Ukraine's proxy war may spread to other European countries such as Serbia, Kosovo, Moldova, Lithuania and Estonia.

Ukraine is getting closer and closer to triggering a nuclear disaster in Europe with the bombing of the largest atomic power plant in the region. If one looks at the possible countries affected, one could say that they are expendable for the "West" and therefore permissible. If this is unacceptable and unheard of, it would be enough to recall Harry S. Truman and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Undoubtedly, the non-compliance with the Minsk Agreements and NATO's approach to Russia to force it to carry out the "unprovoked and unjustified attack" on Ukraine and the visit, first by Nancy Pelosi and then by other members of the U.S. Congress to Taiwan, were moves that started a very dangerous game that Biden, the United States and its acolytes decided to play on the "world chessboard" while disregarding logic and recommendations. Forced to cross the Rubicon, Putin and Russia responded with the "special military operation" and Xi Jinping with the warning that "whoever plays with fire will get burned." Let us hope that the instinct of conservation is stronger than the lust for power and wealth of those who started the game.

Translated by ESTI

https://en.granma.cu/mundo/2022-09-20/t ... he-new-one

*********************

Rhetoric of hegemonic US underscores hypocrisy
By Grenville Cross | China Daily Global | Updated: 2022-10-13 09:06

Image
The White House is seen in Washington, DC, US on Aug 7, 2022. [Photo/Agencies]

After United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan on Aug 2, her compatriots continued to stoke regional tensions and have sought to provoke China at every opportunity, hoping to trigger a response.

Whereas their rhetoric has been inflammatory, their hypocrisy has been blatant.

On Sept 27, for example, when US Vice-President Kamala Harris visited Japan for the funeral of former leader Shinzo Abe, she could not resist stirring things up. Instead of concentrating on the funeral rites, she chose instead to needle China, accusing it of undermining the "international rules-based order".This, of course, is code for US hegemony, and she even claimed, notwithstanding the US having done the same thing for years, that Beijing was "flexing its military and economic might to coerce and intimidate its neighbors".

Shortly thereafter, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also stirred the pot. On Oct 1, while welcoming his Australian and Japanese counterparts to US military headquarters in Hawaii, he said he was deeply concerned by what he called China's increasingly aggressive and bullying behavior in the Taiwan Straits and elsewhere in the region.

Anybody listening to Harris and Austin could be forgiven for marveling at their hypocrisy, not least because neither was seemingly aware of America's Monroe Doctrine, let alone the harm it has caused. The doctrine, announced to the US Congress in 1823 by then US president James Monroe, warned the European powers that the Western Hemisphere was now the US sphere of interest, and that anybody failing to respect this did so at their peril. Over the past 199 years, the doctrine has become central to US foreign policy and has been repeatedly used to justify interventionist US policies.

In 2004, US philosopher Noam Chomsky pointed out that the Monroe Doctrine had been used by US governments as both a declaration of hegemony and a right of unilateral intervention in the Americas.

As US power grew, it became bolder still, and this prompted then president Theodore Roosevelt to add the so-called "Roosevelt Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904. This proclaimed that, if the US considered that any Latin American country was guilty of flagrant and chronic wrongdoing, the US would be entitled to intervene. This was a significant extension of the Monroe Doctrine, and Roosevelt's corollary became closely associated with his "Big Stick" policy, which has been used by successive presidents to assert US domination in the area and beyond.

However dressed up, Roosevelt's policy was basically an affirmation that might is right, and early examples arose in Nicaragua in 1909 and 1912, when the US intervened to ensure the country had a government that was supportive of US interests, economic and otherwise.

The "Big Stick" policy, however, has only ever been used against countries that disagree with the US, such as Cuba. Other places, if compliant, are left alone, no matter how vile their regimes, and successive military dictators have prospered.

In other words, dictatorships are fine, provided they play along, but woe betide any that do not.

After Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution of 1959 had ended the kleptocracy of General Fulgencio Batista, the US presidential election of November 1960 was dominated by the theme "get tough with the Communists". In March 1960, the outgoing president, Dwight D.Eisenhower, had instructed the CIA to train a force of Cuban exiles for an armed invasion of Cuba, designed to overthrow Castro and restore a friendly government.

On April 4, 1961, then president John F. Kennedy approved the operation, although the invasion at Cuba's Bay of Pigs, from April 17 to 20, turned into a fiasco, with Castro emerging as a hero. Although Kennedy subsequently told then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that the invasion was a mistake, this has not stopped his successors, except for Barack Obama, from doing their utmost to harm Cuba's government, economy and people.

Moreover, in 1973, the US had no qualms about deploying the CIA to overthrow Chile's democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, a socialist. He was replaced by a military dictatorship, led by General Augusto Pinochet, who, despite a proven record of human rights abuses, was supported by the US, whose interests he advanced.

More recently, US hostility toward Venezuela has demonstrated that it is as committed as ever to regime change. After Hugo Chavez won Venezuela's presidential election on a socialist platform in 1998, he infuriated Washington by making clear that his country's subservience to the US was over, and that he would retake control of its oil industry. In response, then president George W.Bush threw US support behind Venezuela's opposition movement.

Once Nicolas Maduro succeeded Chavez as Venezuela's president in 2013, the US upped the ante. Thus, on Jan 23, 2019, when opposition leader Juan Guaido unilaterally declared himself the country's "interim president", the US immediately recognized his claim. Then US president Donald Trump announced that all options were on the table when it came to removing Maduro.

On May 3, 2020, in a reprise of the Bay of Pigs operation, anti-Maduro insurgents launched Operation Gideon, beginning at Macuto Bay, north of Caracas. A group of armed Venezuelan dissidents, with the backing of a private military company, Silvercorp USA, invaded Venezuela by sea, with their plan being to infiltrate the country and topple Maduro. A day later, a second wave of invaders landed in Chuao, Aragua state.

However, due to good intelligence, Maduro foiled Operation Gideon.

Although president Trump claimed the plot had nothing to do with the US government, his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, qualified this by saying that there was no US government "direct involvement".

With the US having such an astonishing record of interference in the internal affairs of others, it beggared belief that, on March 27, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while on a visit to Israel, declared that "we do not have a strategy for regime change in Russia or anywhere else for that matter".

It is, moreover, extraordinary that the likes of Harris and Austin should have the gall to criticize China for defending its territorial integrity and discharging its regional responsibilities. If, as the Five Eyes intelligence partnership comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US repeatedly claims, this is a values-based world, America's bully-boy tactics are an affront to the comity of nations, and must be called out.

The author is a senior counsel and law professor and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong SAR.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... 7c2ac.html
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Oct 26, 2022 2:29 pm

The « Global Reset » as the Dystopia of Infinite Crisis
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on OCTOBER 25, 2022
Rafael Bautista S.

Business now needs the apocalypse to reboot the system. Accumulation by dispossession has entered its most harmful cycle, with a war led by a neo-Nazism encouraged and financed by the European powers themselves, as a sign of their existential misery.

The crises that develop in the modern world have always implied the indication of a reset, a “restart of the system”. Resetting consists in returning something to its “original state”. This is something recurrent in the history of the crises of capitalism: to return to the “original state” as the substitute paradise of an order without contradictions. An order without contradictions as “original state” is, of course, an invented ideal model; but an order without contradictions is not an order but inertia, and if inertia (the automatism of the market or perfect competition, for example) is the dynamic that imposes every “restart of the system”, that is, subordinating and forcing the real to the ideal, then crises are no longer an accidental but a systemic phenomenon.

In the history of capitalism, crises have always been preceded by speculative bubbles, such as the first tulip bubble in 1636; since then financial crises do not disappear, but are implicitly and paradoxically driven by the modern mythology of “infinite progress” and the consequent paradigm of “development”, to legitimize always, and only, capitalist expectations (the opening of new markets and the generation of “new fields of opportunity” subsume everything to the needs of capital, that is, to the exponential growth of its rate of accumulation): wealth as a result of the absolute dispossession of all there is).

The twentieth century is the great century of capitalism, but the crises do not disappear, but rather increase. It is said that we are currently facing a more serious crisis than the “Great Depression” of 1929, which set the stage for the Second World War; but in the social imaginary, crisis has become normality; it is the very order that always restarts again. In 1972, the Club of Rome Report, Limits to Growth, warned of the future unsustainability of any growth economy, but speculative bubbles not only continued but became more frequent; already in the subprime crisis of 2008, the rhetoric of reforming the system was taken up again, this reform being a new reset, a return to the “original state”.

The idyllic nature of this bet reveals the illusory and contradictory nature of modern pretensions, expressed in liberalism (and its radical updating, as neoliberalism); for example, although modern religiosity preaches a celebrated progression towards the future (called “progress”), the continuous resets of capitalism manifest rather the distrust of that positive progression, hence the financial need to “capture” the future in a portfolio of investments, not only confirms the modern incapacity to understand human temporality (believing that the intangible can be mastered) but also demonstrates the senseless need to guarantee, at any cost, the uncontrolled bets of the global financial casino, pawning the present by commodifying the future.

If the negative consequences provoked by the inherent logic of the capitalist system are always externalized spatially and temporally, then to return idyllically to that “original state” means not to face the provoked consequences but always to restore their initial purposes, which are, precisely, the cause of those consequences. In order for this not to be noticed, the system itself needs to make the crisis a way of life in order to naturalize a permanent situation of expansive, that is, exponential, alteration. In this sense, to return to its “original state” is what always makes possible the constant and necessary impulse of the exponential tendency of capitalism.

But this is not possible indefinitely, because of the same finite conditions that make life possible. The continuous imbalance of vital conditions cannot be projected to infinity. So what happens if the crisis itself enters into crisis? In such a case, returning to that “original state” does not solve anything but, rather, reaffirms the same objectives and purposes that express an infinite projection that does not consider the finite condition of every vital base.

In this sense, the irresponsibility manifested in the global decisions of the rich countries is not something occasional, but the very expression of the irresponsible ethics of the system. The current civilizational crisis, as a cry of the rebellion of the real limits of life, manifests that: the crisis can no longer be a way of life. Continuous destabilization as a fateful stability can only explode as the apocalypse that has been provoked.

All descriptions of the current crisis (generated by the global plan-demic and intensified by the war in Ukraine) suffer from this type of questioning, because this would imply thinking of a situation beyond that “original state”, that is, to notice the ontological difference between what is an intra-systemic crisis and a meta-systemic one. Because when this “original state” is naturalized as the starting point of any possible overcoming of the crisis, all possible expectations end up, dramatically and even resignedly, always justifying the nodal point from which the crisis itself emerges.

That is why capitalism needs to naturalize in social consciousness its initial conditions as the “original state” or unique starting point of all future possibilities in order to present itself as the only possible world. And that only world is, or must be, unipolar (expressed in the center-periphery geopolitical design). A unipolar world-system is the physiognomy of imperial geopolitics, in that sense, it cannot, by definition, democratize its structures. Because of its exponential tendency, capitalism only functions globally if it is from a single center that administers global accumulation, not as the sum of national capitals but as the subsumption of these in a single imperial accumulation.

In that sense, those “initial conditions”, which a resetting aims to restore, are the necessary conditions of exclusive possibility of capitalism as an economy of growth, that is to say, the infinite appropriation of everything, under a single imperative: the exclusivist concentration of all accumulation. Therefore, the promoted “global reset” has to do with the repositioning of a unipolar world-system. There is no Empire in a shared world, there is no center if there is no periphery, there is no “free world” if all are free, domination makes no sense if the subjects pretend to exercise national sovereignty.

In this context, the war in Ukraine is the staging of a conflict that not only confronts Russia (as the nuclear cushion of the SCO) with NATO (armed arm of the dollar). Nor does the multipolar alternative summarize the physiognomy of a desired outcome. It is a conflict of principle, never resolved, and destined to imperial decadence as modernity in extremis, that is to say, as the great disarticulator of any peaceful global coexistence and of any idea of a world that would shelter the expectations of a more equitable and democratic order.

Five centuries ago, Europe made its way to China across the Atlantic, unleashing the genocide and plundering of the New World; thanks to this, the West renewed its possibilities of exponential domination. Modernity is born. Constituting itself as a project and civilizational expansion, it establishes a single Atlantic centrality, first Europe, then the USA: the Anglo-Saxon arc as the concentration of the concept of the West as a single centrality (progressively limiting the civilizational capacities of the East). Modernity itself is constituted as the civilizing and ontological administration of that centrality; the very geopolitical center-periphery design establishes a world classification, which is expressed as a racialized anthropology. In this way, the international division of labor is organized; that is why capitalism can only be global and its centrality can only be Western, thus the West -reconstituted as modernity- and its imperial vocation finds in capitalism the realization of its highest pretensions.

Five centuries later, these pretensions can no longer hide their irrational character, destabilizing everything to make imperial stability possible. That is why war is the permanent order. The entire post-Bretton Woods global institutionality is confined to this certainty and decides to put an end to any dissident power. The rebellion of the limits (euphemistically exposed as “climate change”) is indisputable, that is why the powers that be bet on total dispossession and renew their mythical-ideological narratives to give credibility to their philanthropic demagogy.

Stopping the expansion of China, or rather of the East, contains other expectations that are decoded in the metaphor of the “jungle” used by the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell (his Eurocentrism is eloquent, as well as cynical, when he compares Europe to a “beautiful garden” and the rest of the world to “the jungle”, the victimhood of a decadent power that is threatened by its own nightmares: A garden watered with the blood of all the peoples of the world; it is not surprising that a representative of Spanish imperialism should say so, and on dates that recall the invasion of Abya Yala). Kissinger and Brzezinsky have already preached an imperial policy of strategic dissociation between Russia and China (because the West only knows how to deal with something whose capabilities are reduced to a minimum). But imperial hermeneutics starts from a false presupposition: it believes it knows the world; hence Eurocentrism, exposed in the current Euro-gringo-centric white supremacism, only emphasizes that the knowledge of the first world is ideological and full of its own prejudices.

The problem is the imminent rise and expansion of China (represented in the projected four Silk Roads), but the immediate factor to be nullified is Russia. With the rise of China (in almost all areas, leaving the West in the category of civilizational backwardness), the world restores a physiognomy impossible for the provincial modern-western cosmogony. Just like the Peters projection, which disproves the Eurocentric cartographic scale, the rise of the emerging powers objects to and refutes Western centrality (that is, ontological, Anglo-Saxon Europe, the West as a geopolitical category, with the American Empire as its diachronic continuity).

Until the 18th century, China constituted the paradigm that Europeans wanted to emulate (expressed even by Adam Smith himself); now the West does not allow any other paradigm of life than the modern one and all that this implies: to renounce being the center is to renounce everything and end up, in the imperial vision, being nothing. An Empire does not fight for something, it fights for everything. Therefore, it is not about Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”, but about the internal collapse of the modern-western civilization that, for pure survival, drags everything to collapse. If it does not have everything, let no one have anything. That is why it is necessary to overcome the confusion between system and life.

To stop the rise of China, it must deprive it of the nuclear cover provided by Russia (submerged in a continuous destabilization in its entire border arc) and undo the organizations and circuits of economic cooperation that deploy the new Silk Roads, promoting permanent conflicts throughout that geography; taking away the entire European market from the Russians and Chinese, ends up undermining the Eurasia concept (disintegrating that strategic link is vital to make a Europe captured in the arc of imperial influence endure).

The leaked reports of the Rand Corporation (the report “Overextending and unbalancing Russia” of 2019) highlight, among other things, a premeditated policy of provoking the disappearance of the European Union, making it possible to transfer its industrial capacities to gringo space to replenish its necessary economic reactivation; Thus, waging war on the Russian Federation, through other actors, has several purposes, among them, to take away the European market from Russian gas in order to make them dependent on American gas, which puts an end to the cheap access on which the profitability of European industrial production and its own internal supply rested. Without an assured and cheap energy base there is no advantageous industrial production in global competition and that reality is what would kill Europe, but also the very idea of the West (besides its energy transition propaganda and its exaggerated post-industrial paradigm).

In such a case, what is the hidden intention: does the Empire intend to undermine its own tradition and expose itself without any reference other than its immediate interest? In such a case, its strategic capacity is reduced to pragmatism without practicality: to put an end to all competition, starting with the immediate circle of influence, jeopardizes the affinity of the allies.

Since the Second World War, Europe has become the appendix of the new power expressed in the dollar, so its relative sovereignty is too much compromised; NATO itself is designed (under the argument of containing communism) to discipline the European states. Proof of this is the attack on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, as a warning against any unilateral agreement that might contradict the sanctions imposed on Russia; this attack seriously affects the chances of survival, in international competition, of an economic power such as Germany, followed by France.

Jeffrey Sachs has no doubt about Washington’s complicity, when President Sleepy Biden himself sentenced months ago the end of the gas pipeline (the same with Condoleezza Rice and other personalities). The jubilation of a Polish dignitary, thanking the USA for the attack, is not accidental, since with the sabotage to Nord Stream, Poland and Norway effusively inaugurate the Baltic Pipe gas pipeline (whose supply is ridiculous compared to Nord Stream). In addition to this, the Turkish Stream pipeline is also unused, due to the sanctions promoted by the USA. All this indicates a premeditated strategic blow to European countries, threatening the economic and energy stability of Germany and France, above all, but extending to all European countries, which will begin to dispute the energy that the USA can and will allow them to have access to.

The gringo think tanks detailed this war in phases and using all the global institutionality to encircle Russia, so that it will have no choice but to use its strategic military power. So far NATO has been studying Russian capabilities and progressively arming Ukraine; forcing Russia to use non-conventional, i.e. nuclear, weapons is a premeditated calculation that would turn the world (controlled by the Empire) against the Russian Federation. In this way, they would try to isolate the first military power on the planet and distance it from China (also threatened on several fronts, Taiwan, above all, where the war of the semiconductors would be unleashed). For Russia it would already be a matter of survival, in the face of the growing Western inflammation of Russophobia (updated modern racism, as an absolute devaluation of the humanity of the other). That is what the gringo propaganda of the enemy to be annihilated in defense of the “free world” is designed for. This propaganda always appears when crises break out, disseminating the rhetoric of the scapegoat.

In this context, the crisis is shown, once again, as the organizing criterion of the established system. The imperial gamble and its exponential benefits are always unilateral and inevitably generate resistance. If resources were infinite, resistance would be minimal, but the finiteness of life itself makes life itself react to the immoderation of such a gamble (although this may appear as a passive reaction); but in a world-system, resistance becomes manifest, because this “original state” and the crisis made a way of life, constitutes all the actors in cruel competitors, where there are winners and losers as a matter of principle. The “original state” constitutes the system and makes the crisis the necessary condition for stability, because in this way all resistance is interpreted as a “threat to the system”.

Thus, it is the economic system that makes crisis a way of life and drives generalized uncertainty as the engine of the economy. In these conditions, war is the “most rational” for the logic of capitalism, because the only useful thing is business; thus war is the expansive continuity of capital by its most preferred means. That is why investors and the financial sphere in general do not see the war in such a dramatic way but only as a “field of opportunities” (this loss of sense of reality is the common note of today’s financial world).

But this is not just short-sightedness; it is common sense. And that brings us to the initial considerations of this reflection. If the crisis itself enters into crisis, this means that the confusion between system and life no longer allows us to realize that the crisis cannot be infinite and that a possible restart can no longer be interpreted as a “restart of the system” but as the restitution of the conditions of possibility of life, not of the economic system.

In the current civilizational crisis, precipitated by plan-demia and the calculated escalation of a nuclear war, all Eurocentric rhetoric is nothing but an arrogant apology of the modern-liberal spirit, expressed in the imperial mythology in the mouth of Ursula von der Leyen or Josep Borrell, when they celebrate Europe as the “best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humanity has built” (threatened by ‘the jungle’)”, when that “jungle” subsidizes, with its own life, the real cost of maintaining it, which is precisely what is threatened by the conflict they themselves inflame (as Russian spokeswoman Maria Zakharova made clear, pointing out “the scandalous statements [of Borrell the gardener, which] demonstrate the degradation of the professional and moral standards of EU diplomacy”).

It is precisely in order to maintain this “combination” that this “original state” expresses the liberal conscience in correspondence to the market as a social paradigm, which it sees as the substitute paradise that the modern world has taken upon itself to impose as the only reference for any definition of humanity. In this sense, for the liberal conscience and for the economic system, what does not constitute a market does not deserve to exist, because only in the center would there be humanity, the rest is “the jungle” (what, in reality, claims Josep Borrell, is a new crusade of good -always the Europoles- against evil -the rest of the world that, in addition, they colonized for centuries-, now described as “the jungle”).

That is why the center-periphery geopolitical design is not only geopolitical; all geopolitics presupposes an ontology, and this, an anthropology. That is why the enemy must be thrown into the limbo of the savage, “the jungle”, to justify its annihilation. This is what racism is for, but no longer as a mere phenotypical discrimination but as an absolute devaluation of the humanity of the other, converted into the enemy needed by the system for its continuous resetting.

In this sense, crisis and war are interrelated in a vicious circle as a fateful reality. All the conceptual taxonomy imposed by modern rationality, naturalized even in the emancipatory bets, see the crisis from the crisis, that is, they assume the crisis as the insurmountable horizon of every bet, that is to say, the crisis is constituted in the labyrinth itself where one cannot get out but only look for a safe haven. In such a situation, the Empire is more lucid (even if this lucidity is macabre): if there is no way out of the crisis, then, we must go deeper into the crisis.

Then, blowing up everything is no longer as insane as one might think, but expresses the inertia of the logic of the crisis itself. When the crisis becomes a way of life, life becomes confused with the crisis, then life is no longer for everyone but only for the winners. But if the crisis becomes a crisis then there are no longer winners and the collapse is no longer only imperial, but provokes the collapse of life. From this perspective, what is being staged in Europe takes on civilizational dimensions not comparable to other past civilizational crises, because the current unipolar systemic collapse, being global, is dragging us to the collapse of life itself, this being the only creative source that makes all possibilities possible.

What reaffirms this certainty is the naturalization of imperial narratives in the social conscience. In this sense, the generation of global panic is very well managed through the argument of threat. The threat, in order to become real, needs to be embodied in order to signal an “enemy” that must be annihilated. But annihilation can only be justified on the basis of its sublimation. The enemy then becomes the scapegoat, whose sacrifice saves and returns us to the order that was altered by disobedience.

With the plan-demic, the argument that rights can and should be violated for “sanitary” reasons has already been justified. The scientific discourse itself, which endorses the global decisions of multilateral organizations, incurred in the aporia that no evidence is necessary anymore, in order to disprove the official narrative. To numb the social conscience, the global institutionality mobilizes all media apparatuses to discredit and censor any dissidence that might question the official narrative. In this way, the threat of totalitarianism is carried out from the very totalitarianism already democratically installed.

This is the end of the world not announced, but already in execution, because the new order already deployed as globalization, no longer constituted the world or the idea of the world that modernity had installed as the place of projection of its great myths. When it was said that capitalism, once the USSR had collapsed, had been discovered as savage capitalism, it was not taken into account that this was the verification of the savage nakedness of a civilization which, in the name of the highest human values, only produced the growing dehumanization of human relations. Without humanity there is no world, not even a global village, because all this presupposes an anthropological centrality that no longer exists. What exists is a capital-centrism and a market-centrism that have cornered human beings and nature into mere objects at the disposal of business.

But business now needs the apocalypse to reboot the system. Accumulation by dispossession has entered its most harmful cycle, with a war led by a neo-Nazism encouraged and financed by the European powers themselves, as a sign of their existential misery.

Everything points to a Russian victory, as long as Putin realizes that neither Europe, nor NATO, nor Washington are rational, i.e. reliable (always manipulating world public opinion to become “guarantors” of the reconstruction of what they destroy). But the apocalyptic reset, even if it does not have nuclear consequences, will have put an end to global coexistence, provoking a planetary dismemberment into parallel worlds which will be confronted in all areas, which not even treaties will be able to remedy. Mistrust is indeed already the epochal note, when the UN itself is incapable of even apparent signs of equanimity, giving rise to its own consummate loss of credibility.

The situation is not comparable to the Cold War, because the moral coordinates of the system had not yet suffered such an evident collapse as what we are facing (not even the ethics of the gang of thieves -as Hinkelammert says- are still standing when they assault each other); not only peace has been undermined but also trust itself, however minimal, basic to any definition of international relations (international law itself is useless for such a pronounced decadence).

What is taking shape is an open struggle for survival, with the dramatic overtones that the modern world itself takes as a “state of nature”; that is to say, the very logic of capitalism would have led us to a far from idyllic past, where progress and development itself ended up being the serpent that devours itself, devouring everything. Within the limits of this modern labyrinth, there would be no way out of the crisis but only to subsist as long as possible.

In that sense, this dystopia and its capacity to put an end to the idea of the world would generate a fateful continuity based on the continuous and open threat of the final war. This would continue to represent a “field of opportunities” for speculative capital, the only definitive parameter that the collapse itself admits: to speculate, as the only way to survive.

The dystopia of parallel worlds confronting each other in continuous hostility describes a demarcation impossible to observe. The crisis itself has brought us to a situation in which economies need today, more than ever, complementarity and reciprocity. We all live in a single shared world; life systems are not alien to one another, they incessantly feed off each other and thus achieve the balance that makes life possible. By the same token, global coexistence is only possible in the correspondence of responsibilities and the democratization of decisions. The idea of a multipolar order would aim at this, but always in the concentric terms of deterrent power, since this is the obligatory option that the emerging powers admit as the only possible world.

The “core and the gap” doctrine, the world of order and the world of chaos, made the Empire the guarantor and the gendarme that administered access to global reserves; but this presupposed the consent, albeit obligatory, of the surviving powers. This is no longer possible. Russia, China and the Asian arc already know that imperialism does not want, under any circumstances, a shared world, even less with “the jungle”; and the European powers only have to calculate ways of survival in the midst of their geopolitical extinction.

If the quantum idea of parallel worlds awakens suggestive possibilities in a metaphysics of the multiverse, in the facticity of a shared world, its staging is disastrous. Not even the idea of a technocratic feudalism can describe a world that is no longer a world but the belligerent global disconnection of an endless state of war (which does not necessarily need to reach total confrontation, the continuous threat is enough for fear to admit everything). In the geopolitics of the current tripolar dis-order, parallel worlds do not constitute a multiverse but the prolonged collapse in the asymptotic curve of the crisis. Therefore, the concept of civilizational crisis as a crisis of rationality needs to be reconceptualized, when the crisis has already become naturalized in the social conscience and rationality is only perceived in its modern secularizing accent.

To transcend this dystopian reality and restore the utopian dimension as a human conditio, we need to challenge the modern-western world regarding the root of all rationality, expressed in the mythical narratives, because these constitute a belief system and in the modern belief system the ethical coordinates of the rational universe are sequestered. To free them means to make it possible to transcend the modern ego, as a subjective correspondence of the objectivity of the world; but, let us be precise, the ego is not the self but the system of self-defense that is activated when the world is experienced as pure hostility, where competition, as a principle of life, portrays survival in all its crudeness, condemning everyone as potential enemies.

This operation is not theoretical, strictly speaking, but rather existential. And it has to do with overcoming the false liberal dichotomy between the individual and the community, between the I and the we. Subject and reality constitute a symbiotic relationship, which generates in the subject an untransferable responsibility that determines him ethically as a creator of life. Therefore, there can be no greater existential alteration, translated into a cultural and civilizational malaise, when a form of life, in the name of life, is, in reality, a death-producing machine.

In this sense, the apocalypse necessary for the “global reset” is something more dramatic than the definitive end, because the parallel worlds (in the only world we have), schismatic and irreconcilable, no longer express a cold war but a new type of war never before experienced. If before the disasters produced by the center were dismissed because they took place in the periphery, now the growing social explosion in Europe will be the detonator to put an end to the fragile stability of the “free world”. In the plans of the reset, the elimination of the world middle class configures the fateful polarization between rich and poor, where the rich are individuals and the poor are entire countries; in such a context, which is already current, even nationalism emerges as a survival policy.

If everything results in pure survival, we will have achieved the hypothetical “state of nature” invented by modernity to impose itself as the supposed culmination of human evolution. A reason divorced from life would have originated this labyrinthine crossroads where it is believed that the crisis is solved with another crisis. That is why the alternative is primarily existential, because reason can only expose as knowledge that which has previously constituted experience in existence. Only a new sensibility could originate a new rationality. A new and necessary rationality of life is only possible by overcoming the crisis as a way of life and leaving behind the confusion between system and life.

Betting on life means betting on the life of everything and everyone. In this lies the culture of life expressed by the indigenous peoples of Abya Yala; in this sense, PachaMama is not simply nature. PachaMama is the culmination of a knowledge that allows us to re-know that everything, absolutely everything, is a subject, that is to say, is a person and, therefore, is sacred and has dignity and deserves respect. And the way of life that is deduced from this re-knowledge is “living well”.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/10/ ... te-crisis/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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