Weekend Update 21/4/18: How Capitalism Makes War Inevitable

"...capital’s capacity to produce constantly outstrips the capacity of consumers to consume, as these very consumers are, in the main, the very workers whose wages are driven down, or who are made redundant altogether, by improved technology. Ultimately, this results in a crisis of overproduction, with markets glutted, and workers thrown out of work in their millions...Increasingly unable to rely on economic coercion alone to keep countries within its ‘sphere of influence...the West have been turning more and more to military force. Indeed, the US, UK and France have been permanently at war since the eve of the new millennium – starting with Yugoslavia, through Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Syria and Yemen (to say nothing of proxy wars such as that in the Congo, or the ‘drone wars’ waged in Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere). In each case, the aim has been the same – to thwart the possibility of independent development..."

     

North Korea Says It's Suspending Nuke Tests, Missile Launches 
"North Korea announced yesterday it had suspended nuclear and long-range missile tests and plans to close its northern nuclear test site. It was the latest in a series of concessions offered by Pyongyang in the lead-up to a summit scheduled next Friday between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and a later summit between Kim and US President Donald Trump." See also:  "The decision of Washington, London and Paris to launch missile strike against Syria on April 9, risking a direct military clash with Russian forces in the country, is reverberating internationally. As the Trump administration prepares for talks with North Korean President Kim Jong Un over his country’s nuclear program, it is inflaming military tensions in East Asia."

 

Cuba's New President Pledges to Defend Socialism
"Cuba's new president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, began his term on Thursday with a promise to defend the socialist revolution led by the Castro brothers since 1959, giving a sober speech that also emphasized the need to modernize the island's economy."

       

Clinton Case Could Trigger Constitutional Crisis; Media Curiously Silent
"Wednesday’s criminal referral by 11 House Republicans of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as several former and serving top FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials is a giant step toward a Constitutional crisis...With no attention from corporate media, the referral was sent to Attorney General Jeff Sessions...

(To read the rest, go here.)

15-19 April 2018: Sighs of Relief, Expressions of Hopeful Anger

Is the Empire at Long Last Learning It Cannot Conquer All Nations? 

"They had long been in favor of ensuring this country’s 'unchallenged supremacy' by building its already staggering military into a force beyond compare...It was to be a Pax Americana planet for the ages...'a position of unparalleled military strength'...a single, unparalleled military power 'beyond challenge'... a dream of dominion that once would have been left to 'Evil Empires' or madmen (or the truly, truly bad guys in Hollywood movies). But in the world as they imagined it then, the one in which only that 'sole' superpower stood tall, how easy it proved to imagine a Great Game with just a single player and an eternal arms race of one." See also: "The fading empire refuses to accept the humiliation of defeat of its jihadist proxies, the head-cutters Washington and Saudi Arabia have nurtured as a foreign terror legion since deploying them against a leftist government in Afghanistan and its Soviet ally almost 40 years ago."  Comment: ultimately, and unabashedly in the tradition of Hitler and Bonaparte, the "New American Century" is just another genocidal effort by another morally imbecilic conqueror, in this case a cabal of Capitalists and their vassals rather than one Capitalist-anointed tyrant. 

       

Attack on Syria Did Not Slake Imperial Warmongers' Blood Lust

"Within hours of the strikes, US and European newspapers began pumping out editorials demanding a further escalation of the war for regime-change in Syria....while tactical considerations led the United States to...(avoid) a full-scale assault that would have led to a shooting war with Iranian and Russian forces, the launching of such an onslaught is only a matter of time. The fact that such a conflict could have cataclysmic consequences for humanity will not deter the imperialist powers from waging it." See also: "Considering the just inflicted U.S. insult to Russia by its attack in Syria, Moscow may well choose to respond by hitting U.S. interests in a very different location, where it enjoys logistical superiority and also where the counter-strike may be less likely to escalate to direct crossing of swords and the unthinkable—possible nuclear war."

    

International Study Damns U.S. as World's Most Corrupt Industrial Nation

"No other 'democracy' in the developed world comes close to the United States when it comes to giving big-money donors unregulated power in their national electoral processes...this plutocratic campaign finance free-for-all is why the Electoral Integrity Project (a research undertaking funded by the Australian Research Council with a team of researchers based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University) ranks the democratic election integrity of U.S. elections below that of all 19 North and Western European democracies and also below that of 10 other nations in the Americas (Costa Rica, Uruguay, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Jamaica, Grenada, Argentina, Barbados and Peru), 10 nations in Central and Eastern Europe, nine Asian-Pacific countries, two countries in the Middle East (Israel and Tunisia) and six African nations...dead last among 'Western democracies.'" Comment: now at last we're being recognized for our true exceptionalism. (Longtime suspicions emphatically confirmed.)

To read the rest, go here.

Weekend Update 14/4/18: Trump Appointees' JesuNazi Yearning for Apocalypse Makes Present Confrontation with Russia Infinitely More Terrifying Than Cuban Missile Crisis

TOO MANY OF US have remained comfortably oblivious to the fact all the most fanatical U.S. Christians are ominously applauding the Trump/Pence Regime as "the most evangelical cabinet in history," a belligerently Bible-thumping boastfulness frighteningly confirmed by Tom Waddell of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. 

The Mainstream Media propaganda machine -- ever faithful to the Capitalist mandate to conceal "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power" -- routinely suppresses any reports that reveal the breathtaking speed and vast dimensions of the regime's conversion of our Big-Lie "democracy" to zero-tolerance Christian theocracy. 

Likewise suppressed are analyses that declare theocracy prophetically implicit in the 1954 addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, which redefines the flag as emblematic not of "one nation" of allegedly free peoples but of one nation tyrannized to submission "under God." 

We are also plagued by an obliviousness that is due to the allegedly "progressive" equivalent of the prideful, self-inflicted ignorance that defines the USian national mentality. In this instance it's the stubborn refusal of some secular-minded folks to recognize the U.S. remains more far more opiated by Christianity -- and therefore far more shackled to all its bigotry and hatefulness -- than any other industrial nation.  

Beyond that, even many of us who recognize the multiple horrors of the Trump/Pence Regime's white Christian agenda nevertheless choose to avoid looking closely at its unprecedented ecocidal, genocidal (and therefore ultimately apocalyptic) implications. 
Though in this instance I suspect our denial is a last-ditch mechanism of self-protectiveness, one of the very few ways left us to try to preserve whatever aspects of sanity we might manage to retain in this the darkest and most hopeless of all eras in our species' 200,000-year history.

Quoth Waddell:  

"Most of Trump’s Cabinet nominees...believe that God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, that men and dinosaurs co-existed, that everything is part of God’s plan and that Armageddon is just around the corner. Collectively they oppose civil rights, LGBT rights, a woman’s right to choose, and public education, while they deny climate change, all based on their Christian beliefs." 

Armageddon is of course the final battle of the apocalypse. Christian doctrine states that Armageddon is to be welcomed as the prelude to the second coming of Jesus. When that doctrine becomes a core tenet of the Empire's foreign policy -- as it probably is already and undoubtedly will be after the Senate's all-but-certain  approval of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state -- our species and planetary Motherland will be in jeopardy as never before.
  
Waddell again:

"Pompeo shows he doesn’t understand that the secretary of state’s job is to promote and maintain world peace when he claims that politics is a 'never-ending struggle until the rapture.'"

 

Thus the difference between the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the U.S.-Russian confrontation today.  

During the former I was a married 22-year-old just returned stateside, joyfully reunited with my first wife after nearly two years of soldiering in Korea and newly transferred to the reserves after three years' Regular Army duty. If war broke out, I knew my wife and I would either be killed in the initial nuclear exchange or I'd called back to active duty and -- given the horrors of war -- I'd probably never see her again. But President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had each known those horrors -- Khrushchev's experience included the epic battle of Stalingrad -- and both were men of reason. Otherwise there'd have been no U.S.-Soviet rapprochement and humanity would not have survived. 

But today most of the people in the White House know war only in its sanitized Hollywood version. Moreover they are apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists whose we-have-to-destroy-the-planet-to-save-it fanaticism can neither be appeased nor ameliorated no matter the unquestionable depth of Russian President Vladimir Putin's patience and rationality.

That's why the the sheer terror I feel today is many magnitudes greater than the apprehensiveness I experienced for a few days in October 1962. Today's terror is relentless. It has no discernible end.  It is the spectral companion who peers over my shoulder in my every conscious moment, and it is the omnipresent source of  nightmares too horrifically chaotic to describe.  Its origin is my firsthand experience of the bottomlessly self-righteous lynch-mob malevolence of the white Christian mentality; I lived most of my boyhood in the South, where it rules unchecked and from which its venom has metastasized to conquer the entire nation and now attempt conquest of the entire planet. 

 

I am not afraid for myself or my generational peers; at age 78 my life is effectively over, and the increasing pains of rapidly declining health tell me I will soon be at that threshold beyond which death is welcome. But I am wrenchingly fearful for the young adults and children I know personally and for the millions of other humans like them who might yet live long, fulfilling and useful lives.  I am equally fearful for our Mother Earth, whom the Christians despise as the domain of Satan and treat accordingly -- thus the looming environmental apocalypse that will surely kill us even if by some miracle we escape extinction by thermonuclear war. 

(To read the rest, go here.)