MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

This American Died for Our Lies in Afghanistan | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on January 1, 2020

The school where Anne was killed was “built” by the U.S. in October 2009, only to enjoy a $135,000 “renovation” a few months later that included “foundation work, installation of new windows and doors, interior and exterior paint, electricity and a garden.” The original contractor did miserable work but got away with it in the we’ll-check-later Potemkin world of the Afghanistan Papers.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/this-american-died-for-our-lies-in-afghanistan/

Foreign Service officer Anne Smedinghoff was sent to the country to show how we were “winning.” She never came home.

An April 8, 2013 memorial service for Anne Smedinghoff at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. Anne was killed in an insurgent attack on Saturday April, 6. 2013 while traveling to donate books to a school in Qalat, Zabul province. (Photo by Musadeq Sadeq/U.S. State Department)

It’s common this time of year to write summary articles trying to make sense of the last 12 months; you’ll soon see them popping up everywhere. But all of them will omit one of the most important stories of the year. For the first time in some two decades, America hasn’t started a new war.

A total of 6,857 American service members have died in war since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. George W. Bush began that war, then invaded Iraq in 2003. Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, then immediately expanded the war in Afghanistan. He went on to restart America’s war in Iraq after it was over the first time, launch a new war that turned Libya into a failed state and triggered refugee flows still disrupting European politics, engage the U.S. in Yemen, and abet a humanitarian crisis in Syria. So three full years without a new war is news indeed.

 

This year also brought mainstream confirmation of the truth behind the Afghan war. The Washington Post, long an advocate for all the wars everywhere, took a tiny step of penance in publishing the Afghanistan Papers, which show that the American public has been lied to every step of the way over the past 18 years about progress in Afghanistan and the possibility of some sort of success. Government officials from the president(s) to the grunt(s) issued positive statements they knew to be false while hiding evidence that the war was unwinnable. The so-called Afghanistan Papers are actually thousands of pages of notes created by the Special Inspector for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a watchdog federal agency created to oversee the spending of close to $1 trillion in reconstruction money.

The SIGAR documents (all quotes are from the Post‘s Afghanistan Papers reporting) are blunt. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing,” said Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. …If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction, 2,400 lives lost. Who will say this was in vain?” There are plenty of similar sentiments going back a decade, with hints of the same almost to the first months of the conflict. Dead men tell no tales, they say, but the record of lies is as stark, final, and unambiguous as the death toll itself.

But Afghanistan was always supposed to be more than a “kinetic” war. The real battles were for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, with money as the weapon. One of the core lies told to the public, and on the ground in Afghanistan, was that a large portion of the reconstruction money would be spent on education. “We were building schools next to empty schools, and it just didn’t make sense,” a Special Forces officer explained. “The local Afghans said they wanted their kids out herding goats.” Sure, people have to eat, but America would create an Afghan democracy from the primeval mud, with cluster bombs as its Adam, and schools for boys and girls as its Eve.

And it is on that bruised prayer of a lie that Anne Smedinghoff, the only State Department Foreign Service Officer to lose a life in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, died one April morning in 2013 long after the Afghanistan Papers show her bosses in Washington knew the war was unwinnable. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Elizabeth Warren Has a Bad Plan for Everything – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 1, 2020

Rest assured someone has to pay for all this “Free Stuff”.

Even the Leftist UK party figured this out when they trounced Corbyn.

Independents and moderates will be highly unlikely to support Marxist nutcases.

Count the times you read “tax”.

As George Will is fond of saying-Corporations are tax collectors, not tax payers. Taxes like most government mandates (minimum wage) are costs of business that get passed on.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/mike-mish-shedlock/elizabeth-warren-has-a-bad-plan-for-everything/

By

Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis

Elizabeth Warren wants to steer the US to the Left, radical Left.

If you are looking for ideas, Elizabeth Warren has a ton of them. All of them are bad. Please consider Elizabeth Warren’s Plan.

  1. Wealth tax: Tax net worth over $50 million at 2% a year, and 6% above $1 billion. To prevent the rich from yachting off, add a 40% “exit tax” on assets over $50 million upon renouncing U.S. citizenship. Estimated revenue: $3.75 trillion over a decade from 75,000 households. Most economists, including many Democrats, call that number a fantasy. Courts might also find the tax unconstitutional.
  2. Medicare for All tax: Mandate government coverage for everyone, including for illegal immigrants, with no copays or deductibles. Phase out the private plans of 170 million Americans. She says this would cost $20.5 trillion over a decade, which most economists say is $10 trillion short of reality. Keep the growth of health spending below 4% a year with tools like “population-based budgets” and “automatic rate reductions.” Pay doctors at “Medicare rates” and hospitals at 110% of that. Charge companies with at least 50 workers an “Employer Medicare Contribution,” equal to 98% of their recent outlays on health care, while adjusting for inflation and changes in staff size. These varying fees “would be gradually shifted to converge at the average health care cost-per-employee nationally.”
  3. Global corporate tax: Raise the top business rate to 35%. Apply this as a world-wide minimum on overseas earnings by U.S. companies. Businesses would “pay the difference between the minimum tax and the rate in the countries where they book their profits.” Apply a similar minimum tax to foreign companies, prorated by the share of their sales made in the U.S. Estimated revenue: $1.65 trillion over a decade.
  4. Corporate surtax: Tax profit over $100 million at a new 7% rate, without exemptions. This would go atop the regular corporate rate. Estimated revenue: $1 trillion over a decade from 1,200 public companies.
  5. Slower expensing: “Our current tax system lets companies deduct the cost of certain investments they make in assets faster than those assets actually lose value.” Closing this “loophole,” she says, would raise $1.25 trillion over a decade.
  6. Higher capital gains taxes: Tax the investment gains of the wealthiest 1% as ordinary income, meaning rates near 40% instead of today’s 23.8%. Apply the tax annually on gains via a “mark to market” system, even if the asset hasn’t been sold. Estimated revenue: $2 trillion over a decade.
  7. Finance taxes: Tax the sale of bonds, stocks and so forth at 0.1%. Estimated revenue: $800 billion over a decade. Charge big banks a systemic risk fee, raising $100 billion more.
  8. Individual tax increases: There’s no detailed proposal, but Ms. Warren’s clean-energy plan is “paid for by reversing Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and giant corporations.” She’s budgeted $1 trillion.
  9. Social Security: Increase benefits by $2,400 a year across the board. Raise them further “for lower-income families, women, people with disabilities, public-sector workers, and people of color” by changing “outdated” rules that Ms. Warren says disadvantage them.
  10. Lobbying tax: Tax “excessive lobbying” over $500,000 a year at rates up to 75%. Ms. Warren says this would have raised $10 billion over the past decade, although it probably runs headlong into the First Amendment’s right to petition the government. Use the revenue for “a surge of resources to Congress and federal agencies.”
  11. Green New Deal: Spend $3 trillion, including $1.5 trillion on industrial mobilization, $400 billion on research, and $100 billion on a Marshall Plan. By 2030 hit 100% carbon-neutral power and 100% zero-emission new cars. Retrofit “4% of houses and buildings every year.” For “environmental justice,” put a third of the funds into “the most vulnerable communities.”
  12. An end to fossil fuels: Ban fracking. Halt new drilling leases on federal land. “Prohibit future fossil fuel exports.” Kill the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. “Subject each new infrastructure project to a climate test.” Give “workers transitioning into new industries” a “guaranteed wage and benefit parity” and “promised pensions and early retirement benefits.”
  13. K-12 education: Add $450 billion to Title I, $200 billion for students with disabilities, $100 billion for “excellence grants,” and $50 billion for school upgrades. “End federal funding for the expansion of charter schools.”
  14. A “right” to child care: Build a federal network of local providers, subject to national standards. Give free care to the “millions of children” whose households are under 200% of poverty, or $51,500 for a family of four. For everyone else, cap child-care spending at 7% of income. Estimated cost: $700 billion.
  15. Free college: “Give every American the opportunity to attend a two-year or four-year public college without paying a dime in tuition or fees.” Add $100 billion to Pell Grants and $50 billion for historically black colleges, tribal schools and more. Estimated cost: $610 billion.
  16. Student-debt forgiveness: Write off $50,000 for households with incomes under $100,000. This would phase out as income rises toward $250,000. Estimated cost: $640 billion.
  17. Housing: Spend $500 billion “to build, preserve, and rehab” millions of affordable-housing units. Condition such funding “on repealing state laws that prohibit local rent control.” Paid for by lowering the death-tax exemption to $7 million from $22 million per couple. At the same time, “raise the tax rates above that threshold.”
  18. Unions: Overturn “so-called ‘right to work’ laws” in 27 states. Guarantee public employees an ability to “bargain collectively in every state.” Amend labor law to aid “sectoral bargaining.” Give the National Labor Relations Board “much stronger” powers, such as “to impose compensatory and punitive damages.”
  19. Corporate governance: Make companies with revenue over $1 billion obtain a new federal charter—separate from the current state charter system—that requires them to “consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders.” Give workers 40% of board seats, and put CEOs under “a new criminal negligence standard.”
  20. Industrial policy: Manage the dollar’s value “more actively” to “promote exports and domestic manufacturing.” Create a Department of Economic Development, and have it write a National Jobs Strategy. Expand the Export-Import Bank. Impose a “border carbon adjustment” fee—that is, new tariffs—on imports from countries that don’t align with U.S. climate policies.
  21. Antitrust: Break up Amazon, Facebook and Google. “Unwind” their mergers with Whole Foods, Instagram, DoubleClick and more. Regulate as a “platform utility” any online marketplace with global revenue of $25 billion. Reverse agriculture consolidation, “including the recent Bayer-Monsanto merger,” and create a “supply management program” to “guarantee farmers a price at their cost of production.”
  22. Banking: Pass “a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act that breaks up the big banks.” Let the U.S. Postal Service “partner with local community banks” to provide “basic banking services like checking and savings accounts.”
  23. Gun control: Create a “federal licensing system for the purchase of any type of firearm or ammunition.” Raise taxes to 30% on guns and 50% on ammo. Ban sales of “assault weapons,” and make current owners “register them under the National Firearms Act.” Pass a law to let shooting victims “hold the manufacturer of the weapon that harmed them strictly liable.”
  24. Centralized elections: Use federal money to “replace every voting machine in the country.” For federal elections, mandate early voting and same-day registration. If state elections follow the same rules, they can be “fully funded by the federal government,” with “a bonus for achieving high voter turnout.” Estimated cost: $20 billion, paid by “closing loopholes” in the death tax.
  25. Miscellaneous: Spend $100 billion “to end the opioid crisis,” $85 billion “to massively expand broadband access,” $25 billion on “health professional shortage areas,” and $7 billion “to close the gap in startup capital for entrepreneurs of color.” Double the foreign service and the Peace Corps.

Warren’s Marxist Manifesto Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

When in Doubt, Blame Imaginary ‘Isolationism’ | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on January 1, 2020

The argument, such as it is, is that because the U.S. refused to fight a war it was not obligated to fight to defend a state that isn’t actually an ally, it is therefore “isolationist.”

Referring to Saudi Arabia as an “ally” has been commonplace for a long time, but it was never true. The Abqaiq attack forced many U.S. politicians and analysts to acknowledge the truth that the U.S. owed the Saudis nothing.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/when-in-doubt-blame-imaginary-isolationism/

The U.S. has approximately 50,000 military personnel in Iraq, Syria, and the Persian Gulf, and our military is involved in wars in Syria and Yemen, but the headline we get as 2019 ends is this: “US isolationism leaves Middle East on edge as new decade dawns.” That is the headline for a report from The Guardian, but it could easily have come from many other newspapers. There is a congealing consensus that the U.S. is “disengaging” from the region at the same time that our government’s military presence keeps increasing.

There are just a couple small problems with the story they are telling: the Middle East is the last region in the world where one can argue that the U.S. is behaving in an “isolationist” fashion, and the region has been repeatedly destabilized by U.S. interventions big and small for at least the last 30 years. If the region is “on edge,” it is not because of our government’s “isolationism,” because that doesn’t exist. If the region is “on edge,” the heightened tensions and anxieties probably have something to do with the reckless U.S. economic war against Iran, the ongoing U.S.-backed conflict in Yemen, and the continuation of the war in Syria. Pretending that the U.S. is “disengaging” when it is doing just the opposite misinforms readers and distracts us from the real problems with U.S. foreign policy in the region. It treats a hyperactive, excessively involved America as the stable norm that has to be maintained, and it pejoratively casts anything that hawks don’t like as “isolationism.”

The chief piece of evidence for “isolationism” offered in the report is the decision not to go to war over the Abqaiq attack in Saudi Arabia. The argument, such as it is, is that because the U.S. refused to fight a war it was not obligated to fight to defend a state that isn’t actually an ally, it is therefore “isolationist.” The report is not very good if one wants to come away from it being better informed about the world, but it is a useful example of how lazy stereotypes and inaccurate definitions muddle and distort our foreign policy debate. The vocabulary of our foreign policy discourse is so impoverished that correspondents routinely use the wrong words to describe what is going on, and we are all worse off because of it.

Consider this section of the report:

The impact of the US failing to respond to an attack on Saudi oil facilities was that an act of war on a US ally had gone unpunished, and that ally was now willing to talk with the country that Washington had been determined to bring to its knees.

Referring to Saudi Arabia as an “ally” has been commonplace for a long time, but it was never true. The Abqaiq attack forced many U.S. politicians and analysts to acknowledge the truth that the U.S. owed the Saudis nothing. What are the terrible consequences of not rushing to fight for Saudi Arabia? It turns out that it has meant that Saudi Arabia is looking for a way to reduce tensions with their neighbor. That may be undermining the pressure campaign against Iran, but then the pressure campaign is what created the crisis that led to the attacks in the first place, so what exactly is the problem?

If the U.S. had attacked Iran on Saudi Arabia’s behalf earlier this year, the Persian Gulf would be a shooting gallery, the Saudis and the UAE would be getting pummeled with Iranian missiles, and many Americans and Iranians would already be dead in a war that would still be going on. Choosing not to escalate from one attack into a regional war was not a “failure,” and it certainly doesn’t mean that the U.S. is “isolationist.” The absurd framing and inaccurate language used in this report help to obscure America’s overly militarized, extremely meddlesome foreign policy from public view. Reports like this make it that much harder to advance an alternative foreign policy in which the U.S. is not constantly starting or escalating wars in a region where it has few real interests.

Be seeing you

SumanSpeaks: Current Affairs:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Colleges Dupe Parents and Taxpayers – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 1, 2020

One wonders just how far spineless college administrators will go when it comes to caving in to the demands of campus snowflakes who have been taught that they must be protected against words, events and deeds that do not fully conform to their extremely limited, narrow-minded beliefs built on sheer delusion.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/walter-e-williams/colleges-dupe-parents-and-taxpayers/

By

Colleges have been around for centuries. College students have also been around for centuries. Yet, college administrators assume that today’s students have needs that were unknown to their predecessors. Those needs include diversity and equity personnel, with massive budgets to accommodate.

According to Minding the Campus, Penn State University’s Office of Vice Provost for Educational Equity employs 66 staff members. The University of Michigan currently employs a diversity staff of 93 full-time diversity administrators, officers, directors, vice provosts, deans, consultants, specialists, investigators, managers, executive assistants, administrative assistants, analysts and coordinators. Amherst College, with a student body of 1,800 students employs 19 diversity people. Top college diversity bureaucrats earn salaries six figures, in some cases approaching $500,000 per year. In the case of the University of Michigan, a quarter (26) of their diversity officers earn annual salaries of more than $100,000. If you add generous fringe benefits and other expenses, you could easily be talking about $13 million a year in diversity costs. The Economist reports that University of California, Berkeley, has 175 diversity bureaucrats.

Diversity officials are a growing part of a college bureaucracy structure that outnumbers faculty by 2 to 2.5 depending on the college. According to “The Campus Diversity Swarm,” an article from Mark Pulliam, a contributing editor at Law and Liberty, which appeared in the City Journal (10/10/2018), diversity people assist in the cultivation of imaginary grievances of an ever-growing number of “oppressed” groups. Pulliam writes: “The mission of campus diversity officers is self-perpetuating. Affirmative action (i.e., racial and ethnic preferences in admissions) leads to grievance studies. Increased recognition of LGBTQ rights requires ever-greater accommodation by the rest of the student body. Protecting ‘vulnerable’ groups from ‘hate speech’ and ‘microaggressions’ requires speech codes and bias-response teams (staffed by diversocrats). Complaints must be investigated and adjudicated (by diversocrats). Fighting ‘toxic masculinity’ and combating an imaginary epidemic of campus sexual assault necessitate consent protocols, training, and hearing procedures — more work for an always-growing diversocrat cadre. Each newly recognized problem leads to a call for more programs and staffing.”

Campus diversity people have developed their own professional organization — the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. They hold annual conferences — the last one in Philadelphia. The NADOHE has developed standards for professional practice and a political agenda, plus a Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

One wonders just how far spineless college administrators will go when it comes to caving in to the demands of campus snowflakes who have been taught that they must be protected against words, events and deeds that do not fully conform to their extremely limited, narrow-minded beliefs built on sheer delusion. Generosity demands that we forgive these precious snowflakes and hope that they eventually grow up. The real problem is with people assumed to be grown-ups — college professors and administrators — who serve their self-interest by tolerating and giving aid and comfort to our aberrant youth. Unless the cycle of promoting and nursing imaginary grievances is ended, diversity bureaucracies will take over our colleges and universities, supplanting altogether the goal of higher education.

“Diversity” is the highest goal of students and professors who openly detest those with whom they disagree. These people support the very antithesis of higher education with their withering attacks on free speech. Both in and out of academia, the content of a man’s character is no longer as important as the color of his skin, his sex, his sexual preferences or his political loyalties. That’s a vision that spells tragedy for our nation.

Be seeing you

College ‘snowflakes’ overwhelmed by grief after Trump win

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Rutherford Institute :: Nullify Government Tyranny: In 2020, Harness the Power of Your Discontent | By John W. Whitehead |

Posted by M. C. on January 1, 2020

“Show your papers” incidents skyrocketed. We are not supposed to be living in a “show me your papers” society. Despite this, the U.S. government has introduced measures allowing police and other law enforcement officials to stop individuals (citizens and noncitizens alike), demand they identify themselves, and subject them to patdowns, warrantless searches, and interrogations. These actions fly in the face of longstanding constitutional safeguards forbidding such police state tactics.

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/nullify_government_tyranny_in_2020_harness_the_power_of_your_discontent

By John W. Whitehead

“The people have the power, all we have to do is awaken that power in the people. The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government.”—John Lennon

Twenty years into the 21st century, and what do we have to show for it?

Government corruption, tyranny and abuse have propelled us at warp speed towards a full-blown police state in which egregious surveillance, roadside strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, censorship, retaliatory arrests, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, indefinite detentions, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, and pay-to-play politicians have become the new normal.

Here’s just a small sampling of the laundry list of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government over the past two decades.

The government failed to protect our lives, liberty and happiness. The predators of the police state wreaked havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives…

The American President became more imperial. Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.) claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill…

Militarized police became a power unto themselves, 911 calls turned deadly, and traffic stops took a turn for the worse. Lacking in transparency and accountability, protected by the courts and legislators, and rife with misconduct, America’s police forces became a growing menace to the citizenry and the rule of law… Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

2020

Posted by M. C. on January 1, 2020

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Happy New Year – 2020…

Posted by M. C. on December 31, 2019

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Why I Don’t Criticize Russia, China, Or Other Unabsorbed Governments – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on December 31, 2019

When asked in an interview why he spends the bulk of his time criticizing his own government, Noam Chomsky replied:

“My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/12/30/why-i-dont-criticize-russia-china-or-other-unabsorbed-governments/

Depending on whose political echo chamber I happen to be arguing with on a given day, one common criticism I run into a fair bit which many of my readers have surely also encountered is that I put all my energy into criticizing the foreign policy of the United States and its allies.

“You’re not anti-war, you’re only anti-AMERICAN wars!” they say, as though they’re delivering some kind of devastating slam-dunk point. “If you’re so antiwar, why don’t you criticize Assad’s war in Syria? If you’re such an anti-imperialist, show me where you’ve ever once criticized Russian imperialism, or Chinese imperialism?”

The argument being that someone who opposes US-led warmongering isn’t really motivated by a desire for peace and an opposition to war unless they’re also voicing opposition to all other violent governments in the world. If you’re only criticizing US imperialism and not the imperialism of other nations, you must be motivated by something far more sinister, perhaps a hatred for the United States of America.

I have three responses to this feeble line of argumentation, which I’ll list here for the benefit of anyone else who’d like to make use of them:

1. People making this argument never apply its own logic to themselves.

Nobody criticizes all misdeeds by all governments everywhere in the world. If you run into someone making this “you have to criticize all bad governments or your criticisms are invalid” argument on Twitter, just do an advanced search for their Twitter handle plus “Duterte” or “Sisi” or one of the other US-allied tyrants who the mainstream media haven’t spent years demonizing, and you’ll find that they’ve never made a single mention of those leaders the entire time they’ve had that account.

What this proves, of course, is that they don’t actually practice the belief that all misdeeds by all governments are equally worthy of condemnation. What they actually practice is the belief that one ought to criticize the governments they hear their television criticizing: Russia, China, Syria, Iran, etc. The governments the US State Department and the CIA don’t like. The disobedient governments. The governments which have resisted absorption into the blob of the US-centralized empire.

They don’t put the logic of their own argument into practice because it is impossible to put into practice. Everyone’s only got so much time in the day, so you have to choose where to put your focus. I personally choose to put my focus on the single most egregious offender in warmongering and imperialism. Which takes us to:

2. The US empire is by far the worst warmongering imperialist force on the planet.

US-led regime change interventionism is literally always disastrous and literally never helpful. This is an indisputable fact. Imperialists get very frustrated when I take my stand there in arguments online, because it is an unassailable position. That’s usually when the ad hominems start flying.

All things are not equal. This isn’t something you should have to explain to grown adults, but such is the nature of propaganda. It is true that other governments do evil things; as far as I can tell this becomes pretty much a given as soon as a government is allowed to have a military force and keep important secrets from its citizenry. Obviously Russia, China and other unabsorbed governments are no exception to this rule. But the US is worse, by orders of magnitude.

No other nation comes anywhere remotely close. No other nation is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and engaged in dozens of undeclared military operations. No other nation has cultivated a giant globe-sprawling empire in the form of tightly knit alliances with powerful murderous governments like the UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia. No other nation is constantly laboring to sabotage and undermine any government which refuses to be absorbed into military and economic alliance with it using sanctions, staged coups, covert CIA operations, color revolutions, economic manipulations, propaganda, the arming of dissident militias, and launching full-scale military invasions. Only the US and the nations that its cancerous empire has metastasized into are doing anything like that on anywhere near the scale.

So since I, like everyone else, only have enough time in the day to oppose so many different evils in the world, I choose to pour my energy into opposing the single most egregious offender. An offender which doesn’t get nearly enough opposition, in my opinion.

3. I have a special responsibility for the evils of the empire in which I live.

When asked in an interview why he spends the bulk of his time criticizing his own government, Noam Chomsky replied:

“My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.”

When people here in Australia ask about what I do for a living, I sometimes jokingly tell them I write about Australian foreign policy, which means that I write about US foreign policy. I’ve written many times about how Australia functions as Washington’s basement gimp, an impotent vassal which functions as little more than a US military/intelligence asset in terms of meaningful international affairs.

So all I really am doing here is applying Chomsky’s philosophy to the reality of an empire in which sovereign nations do not exist to any meaningful extent; as a member of a state within that empire I focus on US government malfeasance in the same way I would if I were living in Alaska or Hawaii.

All I’m doing is pointing my personal skill set at what I see as the biggest problem in the world: a murderous empire in which I happen to reside and therefore bear special responsibility for opposing. Which is simply the only sane stand for anyone to take, in my opinion.

________________________

Thanks for reading! 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. 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, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, 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. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

US Conducts Record Number of Strikes in Somalia in 2019 – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on December 31, 2019

Africa is the next-another-Middle East

Spending US lives defending America precious/rare earth minerals.

https://news.antiwar.com/2019/12/30/us-conducts-record-number-of-strikes-in-somalia-in-2019/

Three US airstrikes against Somalia on Sunday have brought the number of attacks in that country in 2019 to 63, the most ever by US forces in Somalia, and a substantial increase from the 47 in 2018.

US African Command (AFRICOM) claimed four fighters were killed in the Sunday airstrikes, all from al-Shabaab. Officials reiterated that they consider al-Shabaab to be a “global menace” intent on attacking the US homeland.

There is no apparent evidence that al-Shabaab has the capability of attacking the US homeland, and the group seems heavily confined to Somalia and northern Kenya. 110 US airstrikes in the past two years, however, certainly would be a motivator for the group to find a way to strike back.

AFRICOM has generally insisted everyone they kill in Somalia is al-Shabaab, though several strikes have been followed by claims from locals that civilian bystanders were slain in US operations. The Somali government generally does not take complaints of civilian deaths seriously.

Be seeing you

hillary-lied-people-died

Died for the CIA/Hillary sending arms South into Africa

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

2019: the year of peak green bullsh*t – spiked

Posted by M. C. on December 31, 2019

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/12/30/2019-the-year-of-peak-green-bullsht/

Greta, Prince Harry and Extinction Rebellion took the eco-cult to new heights of madness.

Ben Pile

2019 was the most extraordinary year of green bullshit yet. Despite the planet being a wealthier, healthier and safer place than it was when fears of global warming first appeared on the political agenda in the 1980s – and despite the failure of more than half a century of green prognostications – crazy and destructive green ideas still dominate politics.


Royal hypocrisy

In 2019, green doublespeak went mainstream. Harry and Meghan had intended to ‘eco-signal’ by warning us about climate change. At the same time, they were hopping on private jets to stay in luxury villas…


Greta and the school strikes

… There could be no doubting the sincerity of the teen who bore the emotional scars inflicted on her by the movement that she was to lead – she had been so traumatised by green propaganda that she had not spoken, not eaten and had refused to go to school. Environmentalism is nothing if not a cult of self-harm.


Extinction Rebellion

…leading in one famous case in Canning Town to people taking matters – and the protesters – into their own hands. Agitated commuters dragged protesters off the roof of the train they were holding up. Despite favourable media coverage, XR was emphatically rejected by the public…


Got it? Get the rest at: https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/12/30/2019-the-year-of-peak-green-bullsht/

Be seeing you

Climate Skeptics Are Winning The Debate | Climate Dispatch

Did I mention it is all about control?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »