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That Time John Bolton Said It’s Good To Lie About War – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on May 17, 2019

Back in 2012 at a forum for the Washington Institute Of Near East Policy think tank, the group’s Director of Research Patrick Clawson openly talked about the possibility of using a false flag to provoke a war with Iran, citing the various ways the US has done exactly that with its previous wars.

“I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it’s very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to war with Iran,” Clawson began.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/05/16/that-time-john-bolton-said-its-good-to-lie-about-war/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

That Time John Bolton Said It’s Good To Lie About War

Journalist Whitney Webb recently tweeted a 2010 video clip I’d never seen before featuring US National Security Advisor John Bolton defending the use of deception in advancing military agendas, which highlights something we should all be paying attention to as Trump administration foreign policy becomes increasingly Boltonized.

On a December 2010 episode of Fox News’ Freedom Watch, Bolton and the show’s host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.

“Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate,” Bolton said. “You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.”

“Do you really believe that?” asked an incredulous Napolitano.

“Absolutely,” Bolton replied.

“You would lie in order to preserve the truth?”

“If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it,” Bolton answered.

“I don’t think we’re often faced with that difficulty, but would I lie about where the D-Day invasion was going to take place to deceive the Germans, you’d better believe it,” Bolton continued.

“Why do people in the government think that the laws of society or the rules don’t apply to them?” Napolitano asked.

“Because they are not dealing in the civil society we live in under the Constitution,” Bolton replied. “They are dealing in the anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”

“But you took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the Constitution mandates certain openness and certain fairness,” Napolitano protested. “You’re willing to do away with that in order to attain a temporary military goal?”

“I think as Justice Jackson said in a famous decision, the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” Bolton said. “And I think defending the United States from foreign threats does require actions that in a normal business environment in the United States we would find unprofessional. I don’t make any apology for it.”

So that’s a thing. And it’s important for us to know it’s a thing because of the way things are heating up in Iran right now, since Bolton’s fingerprints are all over it.

Bolton has long been calling for war with Iran and in a paid speech in July 2017 told his pro-regime change MEK terror cult audience that they would be celebrating the successful overthrow of the Iranian government together before 2019. Now we’re seeing threat alarms being elevated and fearmongering about Iranian missiles being circulated, with reports being leaked to the press of possible plans to send 120,000 US troops to the region.

This is an environment that is ripe for deceptions of all sorts, and, given what Bolton said on live television nearly a decade ago, we would all do very well to remain very, very skeptical of any and all news we hear about Iran going forward. If for example you hear that within this environment of escalated tensions and military posturing Iran or one of its “proxies” has attacked the United States in some way, your immediate response should be one of intense skepticism about what the mass media talking heads are telling you to believe.

Back in 2012 at a forum for the Washington Institute Of Near East Policy think tank, the group’s Director of Research Patrick Clawson openly talked about the possibility of using a false flag to provoke a war with Iran, citing the various ways the US has done exactly that with its previous wars.

“I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it’s very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to war with Iran,” Clawson began.

(Can I just pause here to note what a bizarre series of words that is? “Get us to war with Iran?” Get us to the thing that every sane human being wants to avoid with every fiber of their being? You want to “get us to” there? This is not the kind of thing normal humans say. You only hear this kind of insanity in the DC swamp where creatures like John Bolton have their roots.)

“Which leads me to conclude that if in fact compromise is not coming, that the traditional way that America gets to war is what would be best for US interests,” Clawson added. “Some people might think that Mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us into the war… you may recall we had to wait for Pearl Harbor. Some people might think that Mr. Wilson wanted to get us into World War One; you may recall we had to wait for the Lusitania episode. Some people might think that Mr. Johnson wanted to get us into Vietnam; you may recall we had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin episode. We didn’t go to war with Spain until the USS Maine exploded. And may I point out that Mr. Lincoln did not feel that he could call out the Army until Fort Sumter was attacked, which is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which the South Carolinians said would cause an attack.”

“So if, in fact, the Iranians aren’t going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the war,” Clawson continued. “One can combine other means of pressure with sanctions. I mentioned that explosion on August 17th. We could step up the pressure. I mean look people, Iranian submarines periodically go down. Some day, one of them might not come up. Who would know why? We can do a variety of things, if we wish to increase the pressure (I’m not advocating that) but I’m just suggesting that this is not an either/or proposition – just sanctions have to succeed or other things. We are in the game of using covert means against the Iranians. We could get nastier at that.”

So these are ideas that have been in circulation for many years. That gun is loaded and ready to fire.

Bolton trussed up his 2010 confession using an example that most people would agree with: that it was reasonable for the Allied forces to deliberately deceive the Nazis about the nature of the D-Day invasion. But we know John Bolton better than that by now. This PNAC director and architect of the Iraq war once threatened to murder a foreign official’s children because his successful diplomatic efforts were putting a damper on the manufacturing of consent for the Iraq invasion. He wasn’t defending the use of deception in crucial military options used to halt tyrants trying to take over the world, he was defending the use of deception in the senseless wars of aggression that he has built his political career on advancing.

Take everything you hear about Iran with a planet-sized grain of salt, dear reader, and everything you hear about Venezuela too while we’re on the subject. There are skillful manipulators who are hell bent on toppling the governments of those nations, and they have absolutely no problem whatsoever with deceiving you in order to facilitate that. And they don’t believe the rules apply to them.

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Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

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No Wonder the Post Hid Obama’s Red Mentor

Posted by M. C. on May 17, 2019

By the time of the Democratic convention in 2008, Davis’s relationship with Obama was common knowledge on the right side of the blogosphere. As a case in point, a month before Maraniss’s article appeared, American Thinker published a lengthy and accurate article on Davis’s communist history by David Walden of the Hawaii Free Press. Walden detailed the reasons for Davis’s strategic move to Hawaii in 1948 as well as his influence on Obama’s Chicago years.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/no_wonder_the_empostem_hid_obamas_red_mentor.html

By Jack Cashill

In August 2008, back when it mattered, the Washington Post ran a 10,000-word article by its Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Maraniss titled, “Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible.” For reasons that will soon become clear, Maraniss should have excused himself from this assignment once he discovered the identity of the man in Hawaii who made that rise possible.

Barack Obama referred to this man in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, as “Frank.” If there was any mystery to Frank’s identity, Gerald Horne, a leftist scholar from the University of Houston, dispelled it in a March 2007 speech. Horne identified “Frank” as “an African-American poet and journalist by the name of Frank Marshall Davis.”

Davis, Horne acknowledged, “was certainly in the orbit of the CP – if not a member.” Horne was pulling his punches. “Here are the facts and they are indisputable,” wrote historian Paul Kengor in his insightful 2012 book, The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. “Frank Marshall Davis was a pro-Soviet, pro-Red China, card-carrying member of Communist Party (CPUSA).  His Communist Party card number was 47544.”

As Kengor observed, Obama dedicated 2500 words in Dreams to Davis, who “surfaces repeatedly from start to finish, from Hawaii to Los Angeles to Chicago to Germany to Kenya… from the 1970s to the 1980s to the 1990s.” Indeed, the two were sufficiently close that the young Obama wrote two poems about Davis — a story I broke in February 2010 — and Davis appears to have written one poem about Obama. I should add that in addition to being a card-carrying communist, Davis was a bisexual pornographer with at least a fictional taste for sex with minors.

Horne did not deny Davis’s influence; he called it “decisive.” In fact, Horne implied that Obama “decamped to Chicago” as a way of “retracing the steps of Davis.” The Davis name had lingering resonance in Chicago, Davis’ adopted city. When Obama first arrived there in 1985, the city’s most influential columnist was Davis protégé Vernon Jarrett. His daughter-in-law Valerie emerged, of course, as Obama’s closest adviser…

Be seeing you

Obama: "I chose my friends ... The Marxist Professors ...

 

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Delingpole: Corbyn’s Watermelon Energy Policies Will Turn Britain Into a Green Hell

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2019

UK government

Still trying to recover from WW II but just can’t quite do it.

The car and motorcycle industry is a shadow of it’s former self.

Opened the immigrant flood gates and they don’t know how many there are or where they are. Much like US.

Knife control – This spring the murder rate (largely knives) in gun-free Londonstan surpassed NYC. Don’t get caught with a knife anywhere besides the dinner table.

Now Corbyn wants government to take over the energy business. Stock up on candles.

“I’m from the government and I’m here to help”, some of ...

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/05/16/delingpole-corbyns-green-terror-will-destroy-britain/

by JAMES DELINGPOLE

“Wouldn’t it be worth five years of Labour lunacy just to give British conservatism the kick up the arse it needs?” a correspondent asks me.

I know that many of us have harboured similar mischievous thoughts from time to time.

Part of me just longs to see all those earnest Momentum kids who think the only problem with communism is that it hasn’t been tried properly yet suddenly reduced by Comrade McDonnell’s economic policies to eating their family cat.

But the price we’d pay for such merriment, unfortunately, is that whatever new conservative movement emerged from the ruins would be building on rubble and ashes: five years of Labour would simply destroy Britain.

Take Corbyn’s energy and environment policies, which have been leaked to the press.

Here’s the Telegraph‘s take:

Jeremy Corbyn has drawn up plans to take control of Britain’s energy networks in a multi-billion pound power-grab modelled on the nationalisation of Northern Rock.

A leaked Labour party document has revealed plans for a swift and sweeping renationalisation of the country’s £62bn energy networks at a price decided by Parliament.

and

Under the plans the energy companies will fall under the control of a newly formed public body, the National Energy Agency. The quango will control the energy system while operating the high voltage wires. It will also oversee a matrix of so-called “regional energy agencies” that will advance Labour’s plans to tackle climate change.

The agencies will be tasked with sourcing low carbon or renewable sources for 60pc of all energy use by 2030. They will also oversee the rollout of electric vehicle charging networks and new energy storage projects across the country…

The big energy firms could have resisted. They could have said: “Look. Our job is to generate the power needed to keep the lights on in Britain as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Leave us out of your green politicking.”

But the easy money from rising prices and growing subsidies was just too tempting. Big energy colluded with the government by pretending that rising energy prices had nothing to do with green levies and climate targets. When everyone finally wakes up to the degree to which their energy bills have been artificially inflated by climate change nonsense, the energy companies are going to be even less popular than they are already.

According to Constable:

It is obvious that energy and climate policies already accounted for a large a fraction of the price in 2014, prices being 17% higher than they would have been in the absence of policies. By 2020 policies were predicted to make prices 37% higher, and 41% higher in 2030.

And that’s just on the current trajectory. It doesn’t require much imagination to appreciate how much more energy bills will soar if Labour gets in and starts erecting still more bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco crucifixes as part of its renewables/low carbon “60pc of all energy use by 2030” target…

The Conservatives, in other words, have had nearly ten years in office to demonstrate that on energy they can be more fiscally responsible, consumer-friendly and evidence-driven than its left wing/green opponents.

Instead, they have bought wholesale into the anti-capitalist, anti-market, anti-science, anti-consumer, anti-freedom green agenda – killing through overregulation the nascent UK fracking industry, pouring more taxpayer subsidies into crony capitalist boondoggles like solar energy and offshore wind…

Be seeing you

Exterminate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Immigration Tyranny and Cruelty Come Home – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2019

Not all Libertarians favor open borders. Some of us believe no border, no country.

We already have a mans of legally entering the US. Flawed though it may be.

Some Libertarians believe that if there is a job or some sort of private support waiting it is OK to make a home here. Otherwise taxation and theft of private property is the result (ie taxation and government using otherwise public and/or private land and property to house and support illegals).

The arrest of the lady helping people in distress – that is simply a AGW (armed government worker) who is either/or low on his quota and exercising his power. I am betting on a power play.

image_511

https://www.fff.org/2019/05/14/immigration-tyranny-and-cruelty-come-home/

by

I can’t help but wonder if what has happened to Theresa Todd will cause conservative-leaning libertarians to abandon their support of immigration controls, the system of immigration central planning, cruelty, and tyranny that both conservatives and progressives have unfortunately foisted upon our land.

Todd lives in West Texas. One night she was driving down a highway when she was flagged down by three young Central American migrants — Carlos, 22, his brother Francisco 20, and their sister Esmeralda, 18.

The three of them had fled El Salvador years ago and had been living with an aunt in Guatemala. Two of Carlos’s friends had been murdered by Guatemalan gangs and a gang leader wanted Esmeralda to be his girlfriend. The three of them decided to flee to the United States. They entered the U.S. by crossing a remote desert.

When Todd encountered the three, Esmeralda was suffering from starvation, extreme dehydration, and infected wounds from cactus spines and rhabdomyolysis, a grave illness that sometimes leads to kidney failure. According to William Kitts, the local sheriff in Jeff Davis County, Texas, where the incident took place, Esmeralda would have died if Todd had not stopped to help her.

And Todd did stop to help, a decision that has ended up costing her immensely. Why? Because while the three migrants were sitting in Todd’s vehicle as she began making telephone calls, a deputy sheriff drove up and then immediately summoned the Border Patrol, who proceeded to arrest not only the three migrants but also Todd herself.

Todd hasn’t yet been formally charged and there is still a possibility that federal officials will think twice before prosecuting her, especially since the 53-year-old woman serves as both the city attorney of Marfa, Texas, and the county attorney of Jeff Davis County. If she is charged, the likely offense will be “harboring” illegal immigrants, which is a felony.  A conviction would likely result in the revocation of her law license.

That’s what Todd gets for stopping to help those three young people, one of whom was on the verge of death.  As she put it,

I honestly don’t feel like I ever did anything wrong: I stopped to help some kids. It’s been pretty transformative for me, to be perfectly honest. To have devoted my life to public service, and then to be Mirandized, detained and investigated as if I’m a human smuggler. The whole thing was really, really, very surreal. It was like a “Twilight Zone.”

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, under a system of open borders, which is the system that we libertarians favor, Carlos, Francisco, and Esmeralda would not have been entering the country by crossing a lonely and dangerous desert…

Be seeing you

La-Raza-Founder (1)

…from the USA

 

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Outdated Regs Are Slowing Technological Progress in Education – Foundation for Economic Education

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2019

I am from the government and am here to help.

https://fee.org/articles/outdated-regs-are-slowing-technological-progress-in-education/

Jen Sidorova

How much management does the technology market need? Quite a bit, if you ask the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It recently announced a new task force that will monitor competition in the US technology market, a goal that seems noble, indeed. But this also assumes that lack of oversight is the cause of tech monopolies. The real reason small business gets crushed in tech and monopolies emerge isn’t the free market—it’s a smothering bureaucracy. And America’s students are missing out because of it.

I was an executive at an education technology startup for over three years, and I saw first-hand how vast government bureaucracy stifles progress.

Let’s take, for example, the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES). Bureaucratic barriers make it nearly impossible for small businesses to obtain contracts.

Any company that wants to sell its educational products to public schools in New York needs a BOCES contract. Without it, the schools will not get financial aid from BOCES. But for small companies, simply getting a contract with BOCES is a labor-intensive, multi-year undertaking.

Companies are only eligible for a contract if they can obtain “purchase commitments” from two to three schools. But most schools don’t want to deal with companies that don’t have a contract in the first place. To apply for the contract, companies have to wait until there’s a Request for Proposals from BOCES for their specific type of service, which doesn’t even happen every year. For a decision, they generally have to wait for another half-year. These kinds of bureaucratic barriers make it nearly impossible for small businesses to obtain contracts.

So, for any new tech company, BOCES serves as a barrier to entry. Vendors have to seek a contract instead of selling their products to schools and districts directly.

While it’s driving prices down for their constituency, BOCES is prohibiting vendors from offering the same discount to non-participating schools. Services shared by districts end up costing less when purchased through BOCES than if purchased individually. However, BOCES requires a discount from its vendors, meaning that non-participating schools will have to pay more for the same product.

BOCES hurts poor schools by creating a barrier that makes it harder to adopt new technology in those districts. Introducing technology into the classroom improves student performance, and since low-income schools have worse education outcomes, it’s critical for them to have access to cutting-edge education technology.

The bureaucracy is deterring new businesses from selling innovative products in New York while giving an unfair advantage to older companies that often carry outdated or obsolete products but have BOCES contracts. With over 130,000 schools in the US and fewer than 5,000 schools in New York, most EdTech companies find it hard to sell their products in the state, so they focus on other states, instead.

The economy suffers from this bureaucratic nonsense, too. BOCES picks winners and redistributes education funding from taxpayers to its chosen favorites, which has an adverse effect on economic growth.

Most states have some sort of agency that gets in the way of school technology purchases and sales. Examples of these include BOCES in Colorado, Educational Service Agencies (ESA) in Texas, and a variety of county school boards in Florida, just to name a few.

 Barriers like these are creating more ways for established businesses to shut out startups from competing.

Faced with a wide variety of barriers, companies cannot easily apply the same sales process across different school districts—they have to figure out sales strategy in each individual district. As a result, lots of resources are wasted.

This is crushing small businesses and hurting students…

Be seeing you

wp-1555692458658.jpg

 

 

 

 

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Smearing Syria’s Victory – Sputnik International

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2019

NYT – The warmongers go to newspaper.

They didn’t used to be that way.

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201905141075009751-smearing-syria-victory/

Finian Cunningham

The campaign is on for Syrian national forces to retake the last-remaining redoubt of militants in northwest Idlib. That might explain why the New York Times was prompted to publish a 5,000-word article based on flimsy anti-Syrian propaganda.

It is the Damascus government’s sovereign right to recover all of its national territory, yet Western media are again trying to spin another “Aleppo-style” onslaught to discredit the Syrian army from its ultimate task.

This week Russia blocked a discussion at the UN Security Council on the grounds that Western powers were traducing the Idlib military operations as a criminal violation against innocent-sounding “rebels”. Most of the militants holding out in Idlib province are foreign-backed mercenaries affiliated with internationally proscribed jihadist terror groups, such as Nusra Front or ISIS (Daesh in Arabic).

 

At this critical juncture along comes a suspicious New York Times’ article published on May 11, headlined: ‘Inside Syria’s Secret Torture Prisons: How Assad Crushed Dissent’.

To be sure, the article is a re-run of a tired old story dating from 2014 when several Western media outlets had back then published sensational claims alleging a barbaric prison, torture and execution system overseen by President Bashar al-Assad.

Strangely, the NY Times seems to be only Western media outlet still pushing the story with its recent update, while other outlets have left it behind. The anomaly could be because the original “torture story” has since been convincingly debunked by several independent researchers. The main source for Western media claims was a mysterious, alleged Syrian military police defector nicknamed “Caesar”. He was supposed to be a photographer working for Syrian military police who smuggled out tens of thousands images purporting to show how detainees were tortured, starved and beaten to death, among other horrors.

The trouble is that “Caesar’s” identify has never been verified, even though he has appeared incognito in front of the US Congress to testify against the Syrian government. It has also been demonstrated that many of the photos he allegedly smuggled out of Syria are either fake, or actually illustrate the opposite of what he and Western media were claiming: namely, that at least half of the victims were members of the Syrian state security forces or victims of war.

Researchers like Rick Sterling, Tim Hayward, Adam Larson and Tim Anderson, have concluded that the so-called “Caesar photos” are unreliable, if not, more sinisterly, a compilation of Western/Qatari intelligence agitprop…

Be seeing you

Western Think Tanks as an Actual Weapon of Mass ...

 

 

 

 

 

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Why Is the US Always ‘Stumbling’ or ‘Sliding’ into War? – RT News

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2019

Whether this propagandistic language is always employed in a totally conscious way or not, it’s difficult to tell. Either way, it’s a psychological trick which frames the most powerful, military-minded and trigger-happy country in the world as some kind of innocent victim of events beyond its control.

In April, Foreign Policy magazine even had Venezuela’s self-declared interim president Juan Guaido “stumbling toward a coup.” How do you stumble into a military coup?

https://www.rt.com/usa/459429-us-media-language-war-propaganda/

Danielle Ryan

The way the mainstream media tells it, the United States never, ever ends up embroiled in wars and military conflicts on purpose — only ever by mistake, or as a result of things like ‘bad planning’ or ‘strategic missteps’.

Very often when media coverage of war is analysed, there is a focus on how hawkish pundits cheerlead for conflict and journalists parrot official narratives while dissenting voices are drowned out. Mainstream networks, for example, have been heavily criticized by media watchdogs for almost exclusively inviting pro-war guests and ex-military hawks onto their news shows to convince Americans that war is the only reasonable course of action, while refusing to let anti-war commentators get a look in.

But there is another more subtle and unnoticeable way that the media deceives us. Even when they are not outright cheerleading for military action (as was the case in the lead up to the Iraq War), the language they use to describe events is designed to absolve Washington of blame.

Next time you read the news, notice how the US is always “stumbling into” war, or “drifting into” war or “sliding into” war — or even “sleepwalking into” war. To “stumble into” war seems to be a firm favorite among headline writers. The US has “stumbled” into war in Iraq and Syria and has been, at one time or another, at risk of “stumbling” into war with Russia, North Korea and most recently Iran.

According to these headlines, the US has also been “dragged into” (CNN) and “sucked into” (NI) war in Syria and Afghanistan, twice (NI, The Times). In recent weeks, the Trump administration has been “sliding into” (AP) a potential “accidental” war with Iran — and back in 2017, it was “dragged into” (FP) the disastrous Yemen conflict.

The examples of the US stumbling, blundering and bumbling its way into wars are endless — and it does raise a question that no one ever seems to ask: If it’s so easy to trip and fall into massive never-ending wars, why isn’t it happening to everyone else? Is Washington just especially clumsy?

With this narrative of the bumbling superpower, agency is always removed from the architects of war. Instead of enthusiastically banging the drums for war, we’re told the White House is always ‘reluctant’ to deploy its military, but is ‘forced’ into it . Then, once the war is in full-swing, when things are not panning out exactly as planned, the US can become the sacrificial hero, propelled into a deadly conflict not of its own making.

A recent headline in the Miami Herald framed recent US actions on Venezuela as the US being “pushed to act.” Pushed by who? The Trump administration voluntarily helped organize and instigate the attempted coups that worsened the country’s political crisis and proudly imposed the economic sanctions which have led directly to thousands of premature deaths. There was no “pushing” involved…

It’s not just media pundits and journalists who employ this kind of misleading language, either. British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said this week that a US war with Iran could happen“by accident.” Did Hunt take a vacation from reality and miss US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton ramping up war rhetoric against Iran for months? Maybe Trump abandoned the 2015 Iran nuclear deal by accident and sent an aircraft carrier and bomber task force into the Persian Gulf last week to “send a message” to Iran by mistake.

Such framing obscures basic facts about Washington’s motives and predilection toward military conflict over diplomacy. Washington doesn’t get into wars by mistake. Unless a country is directly attacked, threatened or occupied, wars are quite easy to avoid getting into if you really don’t want to be in them  — but the hawks in Washington, no matter how much they pretend to not want war, are always itching for more and they will stop at nothing to get what they want, even if that means fabricating evidence (as in Iraq) or pulling off false flag attacks to use as convenient pretexts for the US to ‘respond’ to…

 

 

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US pulls nonessential staff from Iraq amid Mideast tensions

Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2019

U.S. Central Command said Ghika’s remarks “run counter to the identified credible threats” from Iranian-backed forces.

The UK isn’t following the warmonger script.

After 17 plus years of constant war, we have to bail.

At least our people aren’t standing on the roof waiting for a chopper.

https://apnews.com/d2fc57fd74bb45eabdcc15338277ed2d

By JON GAMBRELL and PHILIP ISSA

BAGHDAD (AP) — The U.S. on Wednesday ordered all nonessential government staff to leave Iraq, and Germany and the Netherlands both suspended their military assistance programs in the country in the latest sign of tensions sweeping the Persian Gulf region over still-unspecified threats that the Trump administration says are linked to Iran.

Recent days have seen allegations of sabotage targeting oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, a drone attack by Yemen’s Iranian-allied Houthi rebels, and the dispatch of U.S. warships and bombers to the region.

At the root of this appears to be President Donald Trump’s decision a year ago to pull the U.S. from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, embarking on a maximalist sanctions campaign against Tehran. In response, Iran’s supreme leader issued a veiled threat Tuesday, saying it wouldn’t be difficult for the Islamic Republic to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels.

The movement of diplomatic personnel is often done in times of conflict, but what is driving the decisions from the White House remains unclear. A high-ranking British general said there was no new threat from Iran or its regional proxies, something immediately rebutted by the U.S. military’s Central Command, which said its troops were on high alert, without elaborating…

The unspecified threats reported by U.S. last week from Iran and its proxy forces in the region targeting Americans and American interests contradicted remarks by British Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika, a senior officer in the U.S.-backed coalition fighting the Islamic State group. He said Tuesday that “there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria.”

Later, in a rare public rebuttal of an allied military officer, U.S. Central Command said Ghika’s remarks “run counter to the identified credible threats” from Iranian-backed forces. In a statement, Central Command said the coalition in Baghdad has increased the alert level for all service members in Iraq and Syria.

Be seeing you

dying for nothing

Dying for nothing in the middle of nowhere. How is this defending the USA?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Patrick Buchanan: Tariffs — The Taxes That Made America Great

Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2019

Free trade. Free is good, right?

Buchanan seems to advocate permanent tariffs. The Donald appears to view tariffs as a non-permanent corrective measure, I think.

Tariffs encourage high domestic producer prices and lessen efficiency incentives.

A few win and we pay the price. Literally.

Is what was true 100 years ago true today? I am afraid we will find out the hard way. Time will tell.

https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/patrick-j-buchanan/tariffs-taxes-made-america-great

By Patrick J. Buchanan

As his limo carried him to work at the White House Monday, Larry Kudlow could not have been pleased with the headline in The Washington Post: “Kudlow Contradicts Trump on Tariffs.”

The story began: “National Economic Council Director Lawrence Kudlow acknowledged Sunday that American consumers end up paying for the administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports, contradicting President Trump’s repeated inaccurate claim that the Chinese foot the bill.”

A free trade evangelical, Kudlow had conceded on Fox News that consumers pay the tariffs on products made abroad that they purchase here in the U.S. Yet that is by no means the whole story.

A tariff may be described as a sales or consumption tax the consumer pays, but tariffs are also a discretionary and an optional tax.

If you choose not to purchase Chinese goods and instead buy comparable goods made in other nations or the USA, then you do not pay the tariff.

China loses the sale. This is why Beijing, which runs $350 billion to $400 billion in annual trade surpluses at our expense is howling loudest. Should Donald Trump impose that 25% tariff on all $500 billion in Chinese exports to the USA, it would cripple China’s economy. Factories seeking assured access to the U.S. market would flee in panic from the Middle Kingdom.

Tariffs were the taxes that made America great…

What great nation did free traders ever build?

Free trade is the policy of fading and failing powers, past their prime. In the half-century following passage of the Corn Laws, the British showed the folly of free trade.

They began the second half of the 19th century with an economy twice that of the USA and ended it with an economy half of ours, and equaled by a Germany, which had, under Bismarck, adopted what was known as the American System.

Of the nations that have risen to economic preeminence in recent centuries — the British before 1850, the United States between 1789 and 1914, post-war Japan, China in recent decades — how many did so through free trade? None. All practiced economic nationalism…

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From Boeing to E-Ring: Shanahan is Industry’s Man at the Pentagon | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2019

“My impression is right now everyone in the armed services, at the top, are like pigs at the trough and their goal is to scarf up every dollar they can get their hands on in Washington because this might be their last hurrah,”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/from-boeing-to-e-ring-shanahan-is-industrys-man-at-the-pentagon/

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

WASHINGTON — John McCain is looking down on Washington and he is definitely not smiling.

The late senator had very little in common with the anti-interventionist principles of this magazine, but in the brighter moments of his 35-year career in Congress, he was the Senate’s most vociferous watchdog of Pentagon waste and contractor malfeasance. His grilling of military brass in this area was legendary, and his willingness to dress down an E-Ring four star or civilian executive in front of the C-Span cameras makes today’s congressional slobbering before the military high-hats look pathetic, and sad.

That’s why he would be all the more crushed to see how the Blob is apparently prepared to confirm a recent senior executive at Boeing—the second largest contractor in the entire federal government—to the role of secretary of defense. Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who McCain, suffering at the time from brain cancer, suggested might be the fox guarding the henhouse, has been idling in the interim SecDef role since James Mattis just before Christmas. Now that a Pentagon Inspector General’s report has quietly cleared him of charges that he was putting his thumb on the scales for billions of dollars of new work for Boeing, President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will officially nominate Shanahan for the role of Pentagon chief, starting the clock on Senate confirmation.

This has raised the hackles of defense reformers who always saw Shanahan’s presence at the DoD as the highest form of contempt: even by Washington standards, they see this as is a bald display of industry influence on the levers of power and, ultimately, U.S. national security policy.

“Having promised to change nothing, to simply extend the massive spending policies initiated by Mattis, Mr. Shanahan is sure to be confirmed,” charged retired U.S. Army colonel and defense analyst Douglas Macgregor in an interview with TAC. “Keeping the money flowing without interruption is the sine qua non for success in the Senate Armed Services Committee.”

Critics point out that Shanahan has never been anything but a company man. His only experience in military and defense issues was as a program executive of contracts that sink billions of American taxpayer dollars each year into bloated weapons systems and increase shareholder value.

“Shanahan has zero government experience. He’s a defense corporation guy; his track record as deputy secretary is appallingly pro-MIC [military industrial complex],” Pierre Sprey, longtime military watchdog and defense analyst, told TAC.

Armed with advanced degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, Shanahan went straight to Boeing in 1986. After overseeing Boeing’s military rotorcraft (Apache, Chinook, and Osprey helicopters) and missile defense programs, he went onto the commercial side in 2007, where he was known as “Mr. Fix It” for saving the company’s 787 Dreamliner aircraft program. (More recently, he was forced to dodge any connection to 737 Max planes, which were falling out of the sky before a worldwide grounding.)…

So what we see here is an evolution of the MIC, what many call the “self-licking ice cream cone,” says Sprey. In earlier times, the secretaries had military or government experience and their cultivation of industry influence in the Pentagon was more sotto voce. “Over time, though, you can see more and more egregious military industrial complex shills, just some politicians and defense technocrats.” Shanahan is the first to go from a defense industry giant straight into the DoD’s center of power.

“My impression is right now everyone in the armed services, at the top, are like pigs at the trough and their goal is to scarf up every dollar they can get their hands on in Washington because this might be their last hurrah,” said Doug Macgregor. “And Shanahan is going all out for them.”

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profiteering

War Is A Racket

 

 

 

 

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