News Monday that President-elect Trump was eyeing three hawks for top slots in his administration has put a bit of a damper on the headiness that restrainers on the right were feeling over weekend news that Nikki Haley or Mike Pompeo would not be joining the administration.
By 8 p.m. Monday, there was confirmation that Elise Stefanik, arch-defender of Israel who once worked for the neocon outfit Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Bill Kristol's Foreign Policy Initiative, is Trump's pick for UN ambassador.
China hawk Rep. Mike Waltz, who spent much of his time on Capitol Hill this year saber rattling about Chinese military and spies in our backyard, and calling for a "new Monroe Doctrine" and a lot more military build-up to confront them, is expected to be Trump's pick for National Security Advisor, according to "multiple sources." He worked in the George W. Bush Pentagon and for Vice President Dick Cheney as a counterterrorism advisor.
Add to that, he resisted Trump's efforts to get the U.S. military out of the 20-year war in Afghanistan, and like many uber-hawks in Congress, has been open to bombing Iran.
The Neocon Queen (now on the board of the NED regime change/colour revolution factory) is back... Nuland & Maddow back at the red string conspiracy board The former State Department official tells MSNBC that Trump, Elon, and Putin are "all on the same team"
President Joe Biden has called America âthe world power,â and has referred to his âleadership in the world.â If Biden does indeed see himself as a, or the, world leader, then he has been disappointing in his job and has mismanaged it.
The world today stands on the brink of larger wars, even potentially world wars, on two fronts simultaneously. That is, perhaps, a more precarious position than the world has found itself in in over half a century, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and perhaps longer. Then, the danger came from a single front: today, there is danger on two or even three.
The Biden administration seemingly subscribes to a foreign policy doctrine of nurturing wars while attempting to manage them so that they remain confined to Americaâs foreign policy interests and do not spill over into wider wars. But such fine calibrations are not easily done. War is sloppy and unpredictable. Though a nationâs plans may be well understood by its planners, calibration of what might push the enemy too far and cause a wider war depends equally on your enemyâs plans, calibrations, passions and red lines: all of which are harder to profile or understand.
What is more, the contemporary culture of the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems dedicated precisely to excluding the kind of knowledge and empathy that allows one to understand an adversaryâs mind, and instead to fostering ill-informed and hate-filled prejudice. (...)
The intertwined anniversaries this year of Guatemalaâs 1944 Revolution and the 1954 coup that ended it provide an essential lens for understanding both Guatemala's history and U.S. geopolitical strategies in Latin America and the Global South more broadly.
The "Ten Years of Spring" (1944-1954) was a brief period of reforms aimed at addressing deep inequalities in land distribution and labor rights, particularly for the majority indigenous populations. However, this momentum was abruptly halted by a U.S.-backed coup in 1954, leaving lasting scars on Guatemala and shaping U.S. interventionist policies in the region and beyond. (...)
Welcome to the defense death spiral At the current spending rate, in another generation we will have a lot of rich contractors and no aircraft or Naval fleets to speak of
A basic truth in Washington is that almost every single new weapon system ends up costing significantly more than the one it is replacing.
As the cost of weapons increases, the number of systems produced decreases. Thatâs how the United States ended up with only 21 B-2s, 187 F-22s, and three Zumwalt-class destroyers, rather than the 132, 750, and 32 respectively the military initially promised. This phenomenon creates what is known as the Defense Death Spiral, when the unit cost of new weapons outrace defense budgets.
John Boyd and his friends in the Military Reform Movement during the late Cold War years warned us about the military industrial congressional complex 50 years ago. This small band of Pentagon insiders saw with their own eyes how the political economy created by the financial and political connections between the military elite, the defense industry, and societyâs ruling class wasted precious resources and produced a series of deeply flawed weapons. (...)
Johnny Harris, a popular YouTuber with nearly 6 million subscribers, published a video on Thursday that sought to answer an enormous question: âWhy does the U.S. spend so much on its militaryâ? He answers that question in extreme detail and ultimately arrives at uncovering why, in large part, the Pentagon budget is so high: the corrupt process of how lawmakers and big defense contractors and their lobbyists are all on the take.
The first half of Harrisâs deep, 28 minute long dive into the U.S. military budget focuses on what the Pentagon is actually paying for, things like troopsâ salaries and health care, operations and maintenance, bases, construction, and research and development. He notes that the Defense Department is so big and complex, it has never been able to pass a financial audit.
âThe U.S. is not a normal country with a regular military,â Harris says, by way of offering a kind of explanation as to why the Pentagon spends so much on all these things. âThe U.S. is a global hegemon who uses its military to assert control and order over every corner of the globe,â he adds, in effect, flagging American primacy as a culprit. (...)
American culture reduced to aggressive warmongering, ultra-feminist & liberal, Zionist capitalism. Whoa ey...
No bells ringing here. Move on folks, nothing to see.
Perversion & self-destruction are on the march in all the capitalist oligarchies and the masses have long begun to notice. Their votes are counted as extreme right or left wing these days.
The mainstream media who keep aiming their infectious slime blob at us all, feeding off of our taxes and us "voluntarily addicted" readily paying them all we can afford (and more) desperately keep painting a different picture.
Calling for peace, or environmental restriction makes people radicals or terrorists in the eye of the blob.
In so far, the US are dangerously trance-dancing all the West into harmageddon without all our influencers noticing and mankind as sheeple keeps heading for the guillotine.
Is this really necessary?
During the Cold War we had a chance to evade this. Then, when the USSR crashed, we let our guards down and allowed our own capitalist system to devour us all for the financial rewards of a few.
Oligarchy 2.0 on steroids, thanks to the world-leader of this self-destructive movement, "USA".
What the US Did to Haiti How the American public's ignorance of the country's destructive policy towards Haiti fuels racialized narratives about the supposed threat of Haitian immigrants.
Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have recently been pushing vicious racist fake news about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, claiming they are stealing and eating people's pets and destroying the town. But why are there Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, in the first place? What role has U.S. foreign policy played in driving Haitians from Haiti? Jonathan Katz is one of the leading journalists writing about U.S. imperialism and is a specialist in Haiti. The former Port-au-Prince bureau chief for the Associated Press, he is the author of the books The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster and Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of Americaâs Empire. Katz tells us about the history of U.S. relations with Haiti, common misconceptions about the country, and the deeper meaning of the Springfield pet-eating scare and how it fits with longstanding racialized narratives about supposedly threatening Haitians. (...)