On 7/25/20, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For some long number of months I've thought of our nation as, the
"American Corporate Empire"(ACE).
But perhaps, American Industrial/Military Corporate Oligarch(AIMCO),
would be a better fit.
Carl Jarvis: living under the thumb of the New American Empire.
On 7/25/20, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic, the U.S. War Machine Presses On
https://socialistaction.org/2020/07/24/amidst-the-covid-19-pandemic-the-u-s-war-machine-presses-on/
July 24, 2020
By JEFF MACKLER
That Russia paid the Taliban financial bounties to kill 18 U.S. and
“coalition” soldiers in Afghanistan is in dispute to say the least. Both
Democrats and Republicans cite various and conflicting official U.S.
intelligence agencies on the veracity of this latest New Cold War
episode. The July 9 New York Times reported, “The C.I.A. – as well as
analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center – expressed medium or
moderate confidence in that conclusion. The National Security Agency,
which puts greater stock in surveillance intercepts, was more skeptical,
officials have said.”
As with the Democrats’ Russiagate charges that Vladimir Putin and
Company rigged the 2016 elections – without a shred evidence of a single
ballot box or computer voting machine manipulation anywhere in the U.S.
– today’s Cold War Democratic Party tops are leading the charge in
demanding that the U.S. increase its sanctions on Russia, while accusing
President Trump of being soft on “tyrants” the world over.
Bi-partisan bluster and bluff aside on the 19-year U.S. war on
Afghanistan – the longest U.S. war in history – the warmongering
corporate media’s twisted “big lie” reporting misses the proverbial
forest for the trees, or better, for a handful of alleged twigs on the
trees.
The truth about the Afghan war
The truth about the Afghanistan War is stark and horrifying. After 19
years and $2 trillion in Pentagon spending, after deploying more than
120,000 U.S. troops at the highpoint of the war – half of them
U.S.-financed Blackwater and other privatized mercenary and war
crimes-committing forces accountable to no one – after more than 460,000
civilians killed directly and indirectly and 2,400 U.S. troops dead and
another 20,660 wounded, the war continues. The U.S. government, however,
and not its imposed puppet government of warlords and corrupt corporate
intriguers, is negotiating a “peace” treaty with the Islamic theocratic
Taliban, who occupy much of rural Afghanistan. The latter negotiations
are said to be held up due to the Taliban’s failure to agree to release
some U.S. prisoners.
The above figures, except for the 360,000 indirectly killed due to the
U.S. war, are the official tallies of the U.S. Defense Department. They
omit the estimated 55,000 dead among the U.S.-trained and financed
Afghan Army forces as well as the dead and wounded among the
U.S.-orchestrated “coalition” of a dozen nations brought on board to
lend an “international” appearance to the “war on terror.” We add to the
horror the dead and wounded in neighboring Pakistan, where the U.S. has
been drone bombing with impunity for much of the war’s duration. After
19 years, with the Pentagon “experimenting” with obliterating the
Taliban’s underground bunkers with the largest non-nuclear weapons ever
and with drones constantly hunting for prey in remote regions, some
25,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, half of them mercenaries and
“contractors” organized by enterprising U.S. corporations in the
business of death and destruction for profit.
Need we recall that the U.S. war on Afghanistan, launched in 2001
following the September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center, began when
the Afghan government was charged, not with any role in the Trade Center
bombing, but with harboring Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida associates,
who were alleged to be hiding out in caves in the Afghan mountains.
During the Soviet Union’s 1979-89 war of intervention in Afghanistan – a
deadly war violated that poor nation’s right to self-determination – bin
Laden’s al-Qaida forces and those of some of the seven factions of the
jihadist Mujahidin, were armed and financed by the U.S. government. Bin
Laden, who later claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attack, was
assassinated by U.S. Navy SEALs in Pakistan in 2011. But the U.S. war
continues to this day. Not for freedom and democracy, to be sure, but
for “geopolitical advantage” – that is, booty.
Since the U.S. war began in 2001, Afghanistan, 80 percent rural
countryside, has been the world’s leading illicit opium producer. Its
opium poppy harvest produces more than 90 percent of heroin globally and
more than 95 percent of the European supply. More land is used for opium
in Afghanistan than is used for coca cultivation in all of Latin
America. Further, Afghanistan’s lithium reserves, worth trillions of
dollars, are the most valuable in the world, ahead of Bolivia. Since
2011, the Pentagon’s financial arm has been in negotiations with various
corporate entities as to which will be granted mining contracts.
Similarly, Afghanistan’s gold, niobium, cobalt and other minerals may
well transform this poorest of the poor nations on earth into a global
foreign-owned mining hub. As with the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq,
where oil was the booty, the Pentagon’s U.S. corporate favorites are
likely to end up with the lion’s share. The U.S. fights for lithium and
gold and perhaps a hand in the lucrative drug trade, as it did in
partnership in the 1980s with the Colombian Medellin cartel… and
freedom too!
The U.S. war on Syria continues
Today, the U.S./NATO-orchestrated war against Syria, with the support of
jihadist military forces trained and armed at U.S. military bases in
Turkey, continues, albeit with more limited goals as compared to the
previous U.S. objective of total conquest and permanent occupation. That
war, beginning in 2012, saw U.S.-financed, armed and trained forces from
Saudi Arabia and elsewhere at one point occupying more than two-thirds
of the country. At that moment, the U.S. was openly presiding over
conferences in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere with its invited
guests assembled to discuss the permanent division of Syria and its
resources in the context of the expected imminent departure of Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad.
With U.S.-backed jihadist forces, including al-Qaida and its formerly
associated al Nusra Front firing missiles into the capital city of
Damascus, few believed that the outcome would be otherwise. As with
Iraq, following the U.S. removal of the Saddam Hussein government at a
cost of 1.5 million Iraqi lives, Syria’s resources, if not its
geographic borders, were to be divided by the imperial U.S. in a manner
not too dissimilar from the French and British division of the Middle
East imposed after WWI.
Beleaguered Syria, however, decided otherwise. As a poor and oppressed
nation, it justly exercised its right to self-determination and asked
its allies for assistance. These included Iran, Russia and the Hezbollah
forces in Lebanon that years earlier had defeated the Israeli attempt at
conquest. The U.S.- war against Syria has cost the lives of 60,000
Syrian soldiers and an estimated 500,000 civilians. But with the help
of its allies, Syria successfully turned back and defeated the
U.S./NATO-backed jihadist invaders, who by brute force sought to impose
their version of Sharia law on a reluctant population. Over the course
of two years, these jihadists were driven from one occupied city and
region after another. A major poll of Syria’s population organized by
ORB International, a London-based Gallop-affiliated organization, during
these years indicated that the U.S./NATO forces and all of their
“coalition of the willing” jihadist allies had the support of less than
nine percent of Syria’s people. In contrast, the Assad government,
pilloried and demonized by the U.S. media and falsely accused of using
poison gas on its opponents, had the support of a significant majority.
Today, with the exception of the northwest province of Idlib, bordering
on Turkey, where the remnants of al-Qaida and its allies are protected
and armed by the U.S., NATO and Turkey, all of Syria remains under the
al-Assad government’s control, minus the fertile and oil-rich
northeastern region bordering on Turkey where a contingent of some 2,000
U.S. troops remain to protect U.S. “interests.” “We’re keeping the oil,”
proclaimed the moron imperial President Trump when he was attacked by
the Democrats for removing most of the U.S. forces from Syria! Meanwhile
the U.S. and its NATO allies openly threaten to bomb Syria to
smithereens should it move to liberate its nation from its
imperialist-backed occupiers. An estimated half of Syria’s population
was driven into internal or external exile during this imperial war of
mass murder and destruction of Syria’s infrastructure. And the horror
continues to this day, as the U.S.’s unilaterally-imposed sanctions have
reduced Syria’s economy to barely survival levels.
The U.S. destruction Iran
The U.S. and Israeli governments barely conceal their role in the July 2
massive bombing of Iran’s nuclear research facilities at Natanz. An NYT
article entitled “Long-Planned and Bigger Than Thought: Strike on Iran’s
Nuclear Program,” authored by veteran staff writer David E. Sanger and
others is quite explicit:
“As Iran’s center for advanced nuclear centrifuges lies in charred ruins
after an explosion, apparently engineered by Israel, the long-simmering
conflict between the United States and Tehran appears to be escalating
into a potentially dangerous phase…”
Sanger et al. continue: “Officials familiar with the explosion at Natanz
compared its complexity to the sophisticated Stuxnet cyber attack on
Iranian nuclear facilities a decade ago, which had been planned for more
than a year. In the case of last week’s episode, the primary theory is
that an explosive device was planted in the heavily-guarded facility,
perhaps near a gas line. But some experts have also floated the
possibility that a cyber attack was used to trigger the gas supply.” The
attack at Natanz was accompanied by a series of bombings across Iran.
Trump’s former C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, now Secretary of State, has
long worked closely with Yossi Cohen, who heads the Mossad, Israeli’s
secret spy agency and counterpart to the C.I.A. “The two men talk
often,” Sanger wrote, “making it difficult to believe that Mr. Pompeo
had no idea about what was coming, if indeed it was an Israeli
operation,” as opposed to a direct U.S. operation.
Sanger added, “Cohen was a key player in the sophisticated series of
cyber strikes known as Olympic Games that took out nearly 1,000
operating centrifuges at Natanz – near the site of last week’s explosion
and fire – a decade ago.” Cohen was also head of Mossad during its
supposed “seizure” of extremely dubious “secret Iranian nuclear
documents,” which was followed immediately by a bombastic presentation
of the “secret documents” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
used to justify further extremes of U.S. sanctions and attacks against
Iran.
And finally, Sanger concluded, “In some way it feels a bit like a decade
ago, when the George W. Bush administration handed off the cyber
operations to the Obama administration – part of a broad covert effort
to cripple Iran’s nuclear program. At the same time, the Israelis were
killing Iranian scientists.”
Today, U.S. warships are deployed to stop Iranian oil tankers bound to
U.S.-beleaguered Venezuela, whose oil reserves – the largest in the
world – have been rendered near worthless due U.S.-imposed sanctions,
sabotage, a virtual blockade and embargo. U.S. sanctions, according to a
former UN rapporteur, including blockage of food and medical supplies,
cost the lives of 100,000 Venezuelans.
U.S. sanctions and acts of war against Iran and Venezuela have similarly
reduced these oil rich nations to near starvation levels with their
currencies have been reduced to near worthless.
Venezuela under renewed attack
In late June, Trump’s Special Representative for Venezuela, Elliott
Abrams, announced yet another round of sanctions – but not just on
Venezuela, which is under a near total blockade, but on any company
found to be helping the importation of goods to Venezuela in any way.
Mint Press reporter Alan Macleod provided the details:
“Abrams has managed to force London-based Lloyd’s Registrar to withdraw
insurance and registration to ships the U.S. deems to be helping break
the blockade, meaning they are unable to dock anywhere in the world.
‘It’s just not worth the hassle or the risk for [companies],’ he
gleefully told Reuters. ‘[If] there are people who don’t cooperate…
We’ll go after the ship, the ship owner, the ship captain.’ U.S.
citizens breaking the embargo already face 30 years in prison.”
McLeod continues: “Washington’s power and influence have helped bring
the Venezuelan economy to a standstill, with oil exports at their lowest
in modern history… Sanctions are a bi-partisan endeavor, beginning under
President Obama in 2015, who declared a ‘national emergency’ due to the
‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ Venezuela was posing to the United
States.”
Not to be outdone, the Democrats’ hoped for president-in-waiting, Joseph
Biden, retorted, “Trump talks tough on Venezuela, but admires thugs and
dictators like Nicolas Maduro. As President, I will stand with the
Venezuelan people and for democracy.” Picking up on Biden’s
one-upsmanship denunciation of Trump and aiming to win 2020 votes from
Florida’s rightwing Venezuelan and Cuban exile communities, a Democratic
Party Super PAC touted Biden’s cold war credentials by not only
comparing Trump to Maduro, but to his predecessor Hugo Chavez, and
former Cuban leader Fidel Castro!
The rabid bi-partisan rantings of Trump and Biden and their twin parties
notwithstanding, the U.S. war machine presses on. Ever threatening U.S.
warships patrol the world from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf
to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Arctic waters, both coasts of
Africa and now off the coast of Venezuela, in all cases insisting on
Pentagon and Defense Department proclamations to wit the whole world
poses a threat to so-called U.S. national security interests.
Genocide in Yemen and beyond
The U.S. is a partner with Saudi Arabia in the ongoing genocidal war
against the people of Yemen, where millions die from U.S.-supplied
weapons to the Saudi invaders and from starvation and cholera.
Elsewhere, U.S.-supported and imposed dictators preside over corporate
“interests” on every continent, inflicting death squad punishment or
overt war on any forces that challenge its domination. Its crippling
economic sanctions are imposed on 37 nations; stealing assets in
overseas bank accounts, as with Venezuela, and imposing heads of state
by force or rigged elections have been the historic U.S. government
practice. In the modern era cyberwar stealing of scientific discoveries
is the norm. Drone wars, death squad assassination wars, Special
Operations wars, privatized army wars and open wars that near instantly
destroy any nation’s fundamental infrastructure are daily bi-partisan
deeds. The Obama administration presided over seven U.S. wars.
The U.S. secret surveillance intelligence apparatus has no rival on
earth. Its “enemies” and “allies” of the moment are near defenseless in
its wake. In the name of “national security,” the U.S. maintains the
capacity to spy on its entire population, if not the world’s. 1,100 U.S.
military bases in 80 countries stand ready for action. The United
Kingdom, France and Russia combined have 30. China has 11.
While the horror of the world’s most deadly pandemic in a century has
captured world headlines, the U.S. war machine operates uninterrupted
today but with the glare of terrible deeds largely obscured from public
view.
U.S. ranks first in COVID-19 cases
The endless U.S. imperial drive for power and profit is not limed to the
international stage. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the
average daily new cases in the U.S. “plateaued” for a few weeks at
22,000 per day, all fifty states, ignoring the warnings of the
scientific community, began to implement plans for a return to work.
Capitalism’s wage slaves were deemed expendable in comparison to the
profits extracted from their labor. Human lives, in the U.S. and the
world over are subordinate to capitalist profits. Today, at over 4
million, the U.S. stands first in the world in the number of COVID-19
infections, accounting for more than one quarter of the world’s total
cases. With the “safe” reopening criteria deployed, the daily infection
rate has soared to 70,000 with daily deaths once again over 1,000 and
climbing! Johns Hopkins University reported that the U.S. has a death
rate of 44.11 per 100,000 people that ranks fourth-worst in the world
among the countries most affected by the coronavirus!
Just as systemic – that is, institutional – racism is imbedded in the
very fabric of U.S. society, so are its imperatives to war,
exploitation, environmental destruction and climate catastrophe in all
their myriad and horrific forms. Today, for the first time in a very
long while, mass forces are emerging in the U.S. and worldwide to
challenge capitalism’s deadly prerogatives and bring into being a future
where the multiple horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse are forever
banished and human beings – the vast majority as opposed to the
billionaire elite – build a new world where freedom, justice and social
equality reign across the globe. For the socialist future now! Join us!
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--
___
Richard Dawkins
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond
all
decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this
sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are
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