Is Donald Trump About to Massively Expand America’s Imperial Wars?

Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

– Thomas Jefferson’s Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

Many people voted for Donald Trump based on his pledge of “America First.” The idea behind this partly relates to the very legitimate concern that the U.S. Empire and its military-industrial-contractor benefactors have been squandering an enormous amount of treasure and tax money on foreign adventurism, funds which could be of much greater use at home helping struggling Americans, fixing our broken economy and infrastructure. I’m starting to become increasingly concerned that rather than winding down America’s foreign adventures, Trump and his team are preparing to expand them.

The always excellent Robert Parry at Consortium News got me thinking about this with his recent post. Here are a few excerpts:

The Kagan family, America’s neoconservative aristocracy, has reemerged having recovered from the letdown over not gaining its expected influence from the election of Hillary Clinton and from its loss of official power at the start of the Trump presidency.

Back pontificating on prominent op-ed pages, the Family Kagan now is pushing for an expanded U.S. military invasion of Syria and baiting Republicans for not joining more enthusiastically in the anti-Russian witch hunt over Moscow’s alleged help in electing Donald Trump.

In a Washington Post op-ed on March 7, Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a key architect of the Iraq War, jabbed at Republicans for serving as “Russia’s accomplices after the fact” by not investigating more aggressively.

Then, Frederick Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly Kagan, president of her own think tank, Institute for the Study of War, touted the idea of a bigger U.S. invasion of Syria in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on March 15.

Read more

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.

America is Being Divided and Conquered Into Oblivion

Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.

-Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited (1958) 

The single event that changed my life more than any other was TARP, aka the banker bailout. The unfairness, extreme greed and selfishness with which the status quo bailed out financial criminals while leaving the public high and dry changed me forever. When it comes to shaping American history, it is equal in importance to the attacks of 9/11.

As someone who grew up privileged, I never really questioned the criminality of the status quo system. Like so many others who are beneficiaries of the way things are, there’s not much incentive to look behind the curtain. Nevertheless, the banker bailouts shook me to my core and opened my mind in ways that no other event could. At the time, I was happily earning a very large income at a young age while doing absolutely nothing to benefit society. As such, I couldn’t contemplate why government officials were putting so much money and energy into bailing out people like me, while ignoring everyone else. It felt irrational, unethical and dirty. I wrote about all this for over a year while still working in the financial sector, before concluding that it was time to part ways in early 2010. Even back then, I was incessantly warning that tremendous anger from the banker bailouts would ultimately bubble to the surface and create the sort of backdrop in which authoritarians, demagogues and fascists thrive.

The following years have felt like a tremendous rollercoaster ride. My emotions have vacillated significantly from pessimism to optimism, and now reside in a bizarre state in which the two inhabit an uncomfortable coexistence. I’ve previously defined the monumental struggle of our time as: Liberty and Decentralization vs. Authoritarianism and Centralization. For example, I noted in the post, The Comcast/Time Warner Merger and the War Between Centralization and Decentralization:

Read more

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.

Hillary Consolidates Wall Street Support as Republican Financiers Shift to Clinton

Screen Shot 2016-05-09 at 8.17.21 AM

Some will say that you are simply parasitic on those who labor at menial physical production—these are people who still subscribe to 18 Century notions of value production–and that you skim off profit without doing anything meaningful or of value. Those people are misguided: we know that if money never sleeps, that’s because you keep it awake! You have—if I may use a metaphor–injected money with caffeine, Adderal, crack, meth, with LSD so that it can dance the crazy dance and grow a crazy thousand psychedelic feet tall in a rainbow minute!   Money was a lazy b*tch, until you put it to work! And look how it works! Look how it grows! Materializes out of nowhere!

As you know, my husband tried very hard to change the culture of this misbegotten underclass, by kicking them off the government teat, by poisoning their milk with harsh, bitter regulation, and by disciplining them with the most arbitrary, racist, punitive, devastating criminal laws in US history, laws which Richard Nixon, the Southern strategists, the slave catchers, could only have dreamed of. He also passed NAFTA, which told them in no uncertain terms that they needed to discipline themselves as workers, and learn to be competitive in the global sweatshop, or face certain extinction. But they have not learned their lesson.

– From the post: Hillary Clinton’s Full Speech to Goldman Sachs (Satire)

As I wrote about in detail in last week’s post, Why Trump Winning the Republican Nomination is Good for American Democracy, the best thing about Donald Trump beating all of his controlled Republican rivals is that a Trump vs. Clinton general election will prove once and for all that there’s essentially no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties when it comes to the really big issues of our time.

In a typical election, both corrupt political parties diligently work to ensure that the American public has no real choice, and they are almost always successful. With the clueless citizenry being forced to choose between one corporatist puppet, banker bailout supporting, war mongering, civil liberties destroying sociopath or another, people generally end up voting based on wedge issues such a abortion or guns, and the road to serfdom marches onward. That’s how pretty much all elections during my lifetime have operated.

2016 presents a bit of a dilemma in this regard. While Donald Trump may end up falling perfectly in line as a good status quo stooge, he might not. It’s this risk that is leading many “Republicans” to support the neocon, Wall Street puppet Hillary Clinton. She is the sure thing.

You don’t have to be politically astute to understand what this proves. That that two party system is a joke, a sham, a diversion to keep the public fighting over wedge issues while “elite” criminals from both parties rape and pillage the American public. If that’s the only lesson we draw from 2016, that’s good enough.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Read more

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.

Wall Street Analyst Who Warned on GE Ahead of Crash Calls Clinton Foundation “Charity Fraud”

Screen Shot 2016-05-06 at 10.05.54 AM

The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month.

The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends.

“It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group where progressive Democrat and Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout was once an organizing director.

– From last year’s post: Senior Fellow at Sunlight Foundation Calls the Clinton Foundation “A Slush Fund”

Thanks to Charles Ortel, it’s time to prepare ourselves for some more Clinton Foundation revelations.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The Wall Street analyst who uncovered financial discrepancies at General Electric before its stock crashed in 2008 claims the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has a number of irregularities in its tax records and could be violating state laws.

Read more

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.