The Nature of Foxes

[blindpig]

How the US dynamites its own military-industrial complex
June 10, 2025 , 2:17 pm .


Trump's tariff war puts the U.S. military industry's supply chain at risk (Photo: U.S. Air Force)

In a hyperconnected world, where value chains are intertwined on a global scale , a trade truce between China and the United States came into effect on May 14, 2025 , after months of tariff escalation.

Washington reduced its tariffs on Chinese products from 145% to 30% for 90 days, while China lowered its tariffs from 120-125% to 10%. The measure was driven by pressure from US industrial sectors affected by their dependence on Chinese inputs.

Although the agreement does not completely resolve the conflict, it represents a significant concession by the United States in the face of the rising costs of its strategy —a move that seeks to contain rather than resolve the damage. China, for its part, maintains its room for maneuver, strengthening its control over key exports such as rare earth minerals.

The trade war remains open, but the balance is tipped toward China, which has demonstrated greater capacity for structural pressure.

In fact, on June 5, President Xi Jinping and Donald Trump held a call in which they agreed to resume trade negotiations. Although both described the exchange as positive, tensions persist.

The United States doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum a day earlier , from 25% to 50% , even though their legality remains under judicial question.

Washington persists with a punitive strategy that has proven costly for its own industry, while Beijing maintains a firm position, reinforced by its control over strategic sectors such as rare minerals.

The reality is clear: the United States cannot sustain a prolonged trade war against the country on which it depends on multiple levels, from supply chains to financial stability.

Military dependent sector
A recent report by Govini, a U.S. company specializing in defense software and military procurement analysis, has put concrete figures into a worrying strategic reality for Washington: that its defense industrial base is increasingly dependent on China.

According to the report, more than 40% of the semiconductors that support the Department of Defense's weapons systems and infrastructure come from Chinese suppliers . "Chinese semiconductor suppliers are inextricably linked to the supply chains of vital Department of Defense weapons, such as the B-2 bomber and the Patriot air defense missile," the document specifies.

The situation is not temporary, but structural. Between 2005 and 2020, the number of Chinese suppliers in US supply chains quadrupled. In the electronics sector alone, US dependence on China grew by 600% between 2014 and 2022 .

And while Washington has attempted to contain China's advance , for example by restricting chips for artificial intelligence, China has responded with a firm and gradual policy of controlling its strategic exports, such as rare earths, essential for the manufacture of advanced military equipment.

The domestic situation isn't helping either. US domestic production capacity is in decline.

There are key defense industry categories that are no longer manufactured in any of the 50 states. The situation is so critical that, according to military experts cited by Govini, 25 planned attacks would be enough to paralyze key sectors of US military manufacturing.

The country's industrial base is not prepared to sustain a protracted war or to support its allies under fire.

The strategic error has been to emphasize the race for technological innovation while neglecting the productive dimension. It's not enough to have new designs or theoretical capabilities if the industry can't manufacture them at scale, integrate them into existing systems, and respond quickly in the event of a conflict.

Currently, many of the materials, components, and microelectronics needed for U.S. military production are sourced abroad, and many of those supplies come from actors Washington considers directly hostile.

Meanwhile, China has not only strengthened its control over strategic components, but has also gained ground in the global arms market.

Over the past five years, Chinese companies have entered the ranks of the world's leading defense companies, exporting high-end systems including armed drones, precision-guided munitions, submarines, and frigates.

In industrial and logistical terms, the outcome is clear : the United States is also unprepared for a prolonged confrontation in the Indo-Pacific region .

Its productive structure shows gaps at every stage of the chain: where it has innovation, it lacks industrial capacity; where it still has some production, it lacks raw materials or local technological development.

In contrast, China not only produces more and controls strategic inputs, but has successfully integrated innovation, technical training, and industrial infrastructure.

While Washington focused on importing and reselling, Beijing invested in training scientists, sustaining unprofitable industries, and building a national manufacturing base. Today, China has 39 universities offering specialized programs in rare earths , for example, while the United States has none.

Manufacturing magnets or processing rare earths involves low profits and high investment, something the American profit-maximizing model systematically avoided.

Thus, while American capital sought rents, the Chinese socialist model built capacity. The result , as has been seen for miles, is an American economy dependent on external chains it doesn't control and an industrial base that, to a large extent, no longer belongs to it.

A fragile structure
The current weakness of the US defense industrial base is not an accident, but a direct consequence of strategic decisions made after the end of the Cold War. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, US military spending was reduced, and companies in the sector adopted a logic of financial efficiency: mergers, outsourcing, and custom production.

This transformation did not reduce costs, but rather increased the unit price of each weapons system and eroded the capacity for large-scale production.

The Govini report explains that since 2008, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments of the United States has warned that the low-volume model is incompatible with mobilization in the event of conflict .

However, the Department of Defense's procurement system continued to punish any effort to maintain idle capabilities. Under the logic of "the lowest technically acceptable price," companies receive no funds to maintain personnel, warehouses, assembly lines, or strategic know-how outside of the current program.

The result is an extremely vulnerable military supply chain. Major contractors like Lockheed Martin and RTX rely on a pyramid of more than 30,000 small and medium-sized suppliers, half the number that existed just a few decades ago. Many have abandoned the sector entirely, reorienting themselves to the commercial market.

The loss of this industrial fabric cannot be reversed quickly.

Recent data confirms this: after the start of the conflict in Ukraine, the United States sent 7,000 Javelin missiles, a third of its inventory, at a production rate of just 2,100 units per year.

Despite the budget increase, it will take years to replenish the arsenals without affecting support for Kiev. The same is true of artillery shells: production went from 14,000 units per month to a planned 80,000 by 2025, while Russia fires up to 50,000 per day.

In the Pacific, the needs are even greater , as China alone has 17 naval shipyards and has deployed 340 new ships since 2020, with a goal of reaching 440 by 2030, while the US Navy operates with fewer than 300 ships, dispersed globally. Furthermore, US commercial shipbuilding capacity represents less than one-third of 1% of the world's total, compared to China's 35%.

The United States can no longer assume that its military power is backed by a robust manufacturing base. Military manufacturing is not a switch that flips on demand. The current structure was optimized for accounting efficiency, not protracted warfare.

In this context of growing economic and technological rivalry, the interdependence between China and the United States is emerging as a critical vulnerability, especially for Washington.

While data shows a deliberate effort by the United States to diversify its supply chains , with countries like Mexico and Vietnam, the structural reality remains that much of advanced manufacturing, strategic industrial inputs, and key electronic components remain tied to China, directly or indirectly.

Trump, with his renewed tariff policy, has intensified the confrontation, but has also exposed the limits of a strategy based solely on trade pressure.

Meanwhile, China has strengthened its productive base, boosting strategic sectors through domestic incentives, consolidating its dominance in rare earth minerals, and advancing in the global defense market.

Thus, beyond macroeconomic indicators and growth figures, the real area of ​​dispute is control of the critical nodes of industrial and technological power.

And, on that playing field, the United States faces a dilemma: either redefine its productive model from the ground up or accept a position of strategic dependence that is increasingly difficult to reverse.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/co ... al-militar

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[blindpig]

The Western Oligarchy: There Is No Point In Negotiating In Good Faith With A Psychopath

Only Might Makes Right, the motto of the Western Oligarchy

Roger Boyd
Jun 13, 2025

The Western oligarchy acts as a collective psychopath, above all wanting more wealth and power, utterly bereft of empathy for others, and utterly mendacious and unethical. It will happily shake your hand, smile in your face and make agreements that it has no intention of keeping while stabbing you in the back. Years and years of “good” behaviour will not stop it from coming back for more and more sacrifices. The only thing that it understands is power, and it will use whatever means necessary to increase its own and reduce that of others. This is the reality that Gorbachev, Gaddafi, Assad, Putin for a while, and elements of the Iranian leadership do not fully understand. A reality that the North Korean leadership fully understands with its nuclear weapons and tens of thousands of pieces of artillery aimed at South Korea. The legalistic Putin seems to have taken an awfully long time to understand this reality, although in some cases he may have been playing for time to strengthen a weak Russia; and he benefitted from having a colossal nuclear deterrent. A reality that the Communist Party of China (CPC) has fully understood, with the exception of the mid-1980s when it nearly went the Soviet Union way of shock therapy and destruction; with Western “experts” and Eastern European traitor emigre economists egging them on.

In the post-WW2 period there was only the Soviet bloc, China and North Korea that stood in the way of complete Western dominance. At home, the Western oligarchy had to make compromises and spread extensive propaganda to reduce the allure of a socialism and central planning that had shown its benefits during the Great Depression and WW2. Abroad, it mercilessly destroyed too-independent governments and anti-colonial leaders, together with political movements pushing for a better deal for local populations; only being held back by the enormous sacrifices of the people of Korea, and Vietnam (both supported by large sacrifices from the people of China) and Cuba (supported by the Soviet Union). At the same time, the Soviet Union operated as somewhat of a countervailing force in the Middle East and Africa. The Western oligarchy also worked to undermine the Soviet bloc through an ongoing cordon sanitaire while also working to undermine nations such as Yugoslavia and Poland through financial (debt) and internal covert manipulations and the maintenance of vassal national leaderships in waiting for when needed. China was also shut off from the world, and Hong Kong used as a base for anti-China operations while the errant province of Taiwan was protected from reunification. The Western oligarchy utilized every means possible to maintain and grow its power and wealth, and only compromised when shown strength - as in the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Cuban missile crisis.

The Western oligarchs had started to take a much more aggressive approach to their populations from the 1970s onwards, with Reagan and Thatcher leading a charge which included rabid anti-communism and renewed external aggression. Even getting close to destroying the CPC and China as an independent entity in the mid-1980s by pushing for a wide-ranging shock therapy. The Chinese leadership dithered for a while but then stepped away from the abyss. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, and India and China looked as if they could be brought under Western tutelage, the Western oligarchy was unbound. The Clinton years that extensively remade the US as neoliberal, the destruction of Yugoslavia, the first Iraq War (under Bush Sr.) followed by extensive sanctions to weaken Iraq further, and the transformation of Eastern Europe into capitalist havens while a mass looting of Russia ran rampant and NATO started its march eastwards. Even a First Chechen War supported by the West, and extensive attempts to subjugate the newly independent ex-Soviet states such as Georgia, Azerbaijan and the “Stans”.

Followed by Bush Jr. and the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, the endless “Global War on Terror” (really a cover for a global war on the people of the world), the Georgian proxy war with Russia (smashed by the Russians to the oligarchy’s dismay), the second Chechen War which included acts of terrorism within Russia, and the Homeland Security Act. While the Western European oligarchies got on with implementing a deeper neoliberalism (e.g. the Hartz “reforms” in Germany). And then of course, the mendacious usage of a UNSC resolution to drive regime change in Libya. While the Obama administration negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran always meant to keep it down, and with no real intentions to provide the agreed quid pro quo of sanctions relief. And the Western colour revolutions, culminating in Ukraine in 2014. Russia and Iran managed to forestall the overthrow of the Assad regime, in a country destroyed by Western supplied terrorists. But the Assad regime was always too weak and too corrupt, and after years of sanctions and Western infiltration collapsed in 2024; with an Assad that thought that he could negotiate with the other Arab leaders and the Western oligarchy. The same mistake that the Iranian leadership has kept making rather than following the North Korean path of developing nuclear weapons and disciplining the liberals that are so ready to embrace the West and even act as willing traitors.

The CPC, and the Chinese Party-State that it controls, is the perfect foil to the Western oligarchic psychopathy. An extremely meritocratic bureaucracy, focused on the development of the productive forces and the betterment of the Chinese people which fully understands how to beneficially use markets without becoming owned by a bourgeois oligarchy. For more than three decades it kept its head down while growing the productive forces of the nation at a rapid pace while the Western oligarchy was distracted and drunk with its new China-based profits. Like an abused spouse, or bullied child, building up the resources and will to beat back their tormentor. The clear-eyed victims understand that the only solution is to move (and even that does not work sometimes), gain a much stronger reliable ally, scare shitless (by display of overwhelming power and readiness to use it) or kill their abuser. The Western oligarchy is the abuser.

Only in the early 2010s under the leadership of Xi did the CPC take on a more assertive stance, both abroad and with corrupt and profiteering elements at home. Only then did the West turn on China. But China has kept developing the productive forces, including a mass technology upgrading, based on long-term planning and a patience that negates the unending Western oligarch aggression. Its armed forces are equipped to remove the possibility of Western invasion, as is its deepening alliance with Russia, while its political and economic diplomacy works to maintain neutrality with other nations (e.g. ASEAN). The CPC will negotiate with the West, but not be taken for a fool; as shown by its recent moves with respect to rare earth minerals. It is in for the long haul, and it represents the strong reliable ally for those nations not strong enough to withstand the Western oligarchy themselves. After many, many years of being fooled (or was it playing for time and managing global public opinion?) the Russian leadership has quashed its traitorous liberal fifth columnists and focused on destroying the Ukrainian threat. It is BRINCISTAN (Belarus, Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, Iraq and the “Stans”) that is the core of the resistance to the Western Psychopathic Oligarchy. And that is where the Western aggression is focused, already removing one “S” (Syria) from that coalition and wanting to do the same to the two “I”s - Iran and Iraq.

Donald Trump represents the more brutalist version of the psychopathic West, reportedly shunned by the business elite of New York due to his utter lack of ethics and mendacity during and after business negotiations. Something that he has shown again and again while president. The murder of the Iranian second-in-command Soleimani was a sign-post to this, breaching the unstated rules about not attacking other nation’s leaders (one of course repeatedly broken by the US under all presidents). But this was taken to a new scale with his role in facilitating the Zionist genocide while putting himself forward as an “independent” party for negotiations, and now the murder-by-proxy of some of the very Iranian leadership that he was negotiating with right up to their murder. Displaying full on psychopathy, he states that the negotiations should still continue until Iran accedes to its own disarmament and demise (as with Libya and Gaddafi). The Iranian leadership must remove any thoughts of negotiating with the West, develop nuclear weapons and announce them to the world as the only way of preserving the nation. At the same time removing those that are not fully on board with this stance from any positions of power, further educate the populace on the reality of the Western oligarchy’s plans for the country, and engage in long-term developmental state planning. It must also treat the “independent” agencies such as the International Atomic Energy Authority as what they are, mendacious agents of Western dominance. And strike Israel with overwhelming force, including the mass salvoes of Hezbollah; what is the use of weapons if they do not deter? This will provide Iran with time, as the US is loathe to trigger a wider conflict with a nuclear power. And all Iran needs is time, as the US power deflates. It is the knowledge of this deflation that is driving the Western oligarchy to try to destroy Iran, taking another couple of bricks out of the BRINCISTAN alliance.

But we have to accept that the Iranian leadership may continue with its delusional ways and its fifth column remain active. The result will still suck in US military, economic and political resources as Iran struggles for its freedom and the Middle East becomes a wider battlefield. China will continue patiently overwhelming the US and its vassals in every area and Russia will continue patiently winning any Ukrainian peace. The only parties that should be desperate to negotiate are the losing side of a conflict, and China and Russia are not losing. Beneficially for China and Russia, the Trump administration seems unable to stop itself from engaging in one self-inflicted crisis after another, both at home and abroad while also deeply weakening its allies vassals through escalating demands for tribute (their manufacturing industries and state funds redirected to purchase US MIC output) and increasing aggression toward China.

From the Western oligarch stance only Might is Right, and their might is dwindling away as the days, weeks, and years pass. The Zionist regime also understands this, hence the desperation to settle all scores rapidly. When its bully father is much weakened and its father’s body politic increasingly turns away from its support, the other kids in the region will come for it; and no one else will feel sorry for a nation and a population higher on the psychopathy scale than even the US oligarchy.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/the-we ... here-is-no

[blindpig]

Capitalism in Crisis: Technofascism and Hyper-Imperialism
By Prince Kapone - June 17, 2025 0


[Source: newyorker.com]

Capitalism Is Rotting from the Inside Out
The empire is falling. Not with fireworks or finality—but in slow motion, dragging the world down with it. The dreams sold after World War II—democracy, prosperity and liberty—have curdled into surveillance, austerity and endless war. The U.S., bloated on conquest, finds itself governing not through vision but through brute force and algorithmic fear.

To explain the system that is emerging now, we cannot just recycle terms from the past. This is not your grandfather’s fascism. It is something newer, slicker and far more dangerous. We call it technofascism: a merger of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the security state. And its global twin? Hyper-imperialism—a desperate, high-tech war machine scrambling to hold together a world that is slipping from its grasp.

Part I: Technofascism—Capitalism with a Digital Jackboot
Let’s be clear. Technofascism did not fall from the sky. It is the outcome of a system that has been in freefall since the 1970s, when profits dropped, factories closed, and the American Dream was packed up and sold offshore. The U.S. ruling class responded in the only way it knows how: by building a digital prison.

Welcome to the Surveillance State
After 9/11, the U.S. did not just go to war abroad—it went to war at home. Police got tanks. NSA got carte blanche. Your phone became a snitch. And behind the scenes? The Pentagon, the CIA and DARPA were feeding money into tech startups that would one day become Google, Facebook, Amazon and Palantir.

These are not just companies. They are nodes of control. They manage your data, your work, your moods—and sell the intel to cops and spooks. In this new order, rebellion is not crushed with boots—it is flagged by an algorithm.

Racial Capitalism, Updated for the Cloud
Technofascism did not erase the color line—it digitized it. Black, Indigenous, migrant and poor folks live in zones of predictive policing, digital probation, facial recognition and drone surveillance. It is colonialism in high definition.

Meanwhile, landlords get eviction algorithms. Schools get “threat assessment” software. Hospitals get AI triage. In the name of “efficiency,” the state decides who eats, who sleeps, who dies.

Crisis Is the Model
The whole thing runs on breakdown. Uprisings? Smothered with psy-ops and predictive analytics. Elections? Corroded by disinformation and voter suppression. Media? Fragmented, throttled and flooded with noise. This system does not govern with consent. It governs with crisis—and capitalizes on the chaos.

r/conspiracy - The March of Tyranny (cartoon by Ben Garrison) - This cartoon sparked a years long defamation campaign were authoritarians altered the artists comics to make him appear racist and anti-Semitic. Hmm, I wonder why?
[Source: reddit.com]
Part II: Hyper-Imperialism—Globalizing the Digital Empire
If technofascism is how they run the U.S., hyper-imperialism is how they run the world. The U.S. still commands the planet—not because of its moral superiority but because it controls the pipelines of finance, information and death.

BlackRock Is the New State
Let’s name names. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street—these giants do not just own stocks. They own the economy. They own the war machine. They own the government. Together they manage over $20 trillion, holding stakes in everything from missiles to milk.

And they do not need to run governments. They are the government. Through the dollar system, they can starve a country without firing a shot. That is what sanctions are. Economic siege warfare.


[Source: guiadoinvestidor.com]

Your Data, Their Empire
Big Tech does not just serve the U.S. state—it is the U.S. state in cybernetic form. Palantir helps ICE hunt migrants. Microsoft runs the Pentagon’s cloud. Facebook moderates discourse to align with State Department goals. Surveillance tech is exported like wheat, used by allies and dictators alike to crush dissent.


[Source: reuters.com]

War Without End (or Accountability)
Gone are the days of boots on the ground. Now it is drones in the sky, mercenaries on contract, and proxy wars that never end. Yemen, Ukraine, Syria, Haiti—it is a carousel of destruction run by men in suits and algorithms in bunkers.

Psychological warfare is part of the package. Twitter files, fake NGOs, influence ops—the goal is not truth, it is control.


[Source: mindmatters.ai]

Part III: Fighting Back—Revolution in the Age of the Algorithm
Let’s not get it twisted. This system looks powerful—but it is scared. It is built on sand. And its contradictions are sharpening: ecological breakdown, internal decay, global revolt. What we need now is not another petition. It is a revolutionary recalibration.


Yet another protest being dispersed, this one near the White House. [Source: abcnews.go.com]

Reform Is a Trap
We have been here before. Occupy was pacified. Bernie was buried. BLM was commodified. Every time we get close to rupture, they send in NGOs, algorithms, or culture wars to keep us fighting shadows.

There is no ballot box path out of technofascism. It eats electoral politics for breakfast.

Revolutionary Recalibration Starts Now
If they are recalibrating imperialism, we have got to recalibrate revolution. That means:

Rebuilding organizations grounded in discipline, clarity and anti-colonial praxis;
Creating dual power: mutual aid, security networks, political education and autonomous tech; and
Fighting from the base: with the colonized, the working class, the lumpen, the migrants.
Multipolarity Means Solidarity
The Global South is rising. Gaza resists. Haiti burns. Niger defies. Chiapas builds. The old world trembles. We need a 21st-century Tricontinentalism: a rebel internet of shared tactics, protected infrastructure, and revolutionary exchange.

Our job in the belly of the beast is simple: Sabotage the empire from within, link arms with those it seeks to crush.

The Future Ain’t Written Yet
They want you to think it is over. That the algorithm is God. That resistance is futile. But history tells another story: The oppressed never stop fighting. The future is not a code. It is a struggle.

So organize. Study. Build. Fight. And remember: Technofascism might run the servers—but the people still run the streets.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... perialism/

[blindpig]

War Profiteering?
June 28, 2025
Reported by The Lever Daily, 6/26/25

Lining their pockets off Trump’s war. In the months between Election Day and the president’s unauthorized strikes in Iran, nineteen members of Congress or their spouses reported purchasing defense stock in companies contracted with the government, reports Sludge. That includes Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, defense firms that all saw their stocks jump after the June 13 strikes on Iran.

One of the biggest purchases came from Senate Armed Services Committee member Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), who bought between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of stock in defense firm L3Harris in May. Meanwhile, the House Armed Services Committee’s Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-Calif.) purchased between $1,000 and $15,000 in Boeing, L3Harris, and Northrop Grumman stock just two weeks before the June 13 bombing.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/06/war-profiteering/

******

Cow Most Sacred
Posted on June 30, 2025 by Conor Gallagher

Conor here: The following is from 2011. What’s changed over the past 14 years (aside from the defense budget growing larger)?

By Andrew Bacevich, chairman and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest Dispatch book is On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century and his new novel, Ravens on a Wire, was published as last year ended. Originally published at Tom Dispatch.

In defense circles, “cutting” the Pentagon budget has once again become a topic of conversation. Americans should not confuse that talk with reality. Any cuts exacted will at most reduce the rate of growth. The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history.

The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War — this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a “peer competitor.” Evil Empire? It exists only in the fevered imaginations of those who quiver at the prospect of China adding a rust-bucket Russian aircraft carrier to its fleet or who take seriously the ravings of radical Islamists promising from deep inside their caves to unite the Umma in a new caliphate.

What are Americans getting for their money? Sadly, not much. Despite extraordinary expenditures (not to mention exertions and sacrifices by U.S. forces), the return on investment is, to be generous, unimpressive. The chief lesson to emerge from the battlefields of the post-9/11 era is this: the Pentagon possesses next to no ability to translate “military supremacy” into meaningful victory.

Washington knows how to start wars and how to prolong them, but is clueless when it comes to ending them. Iraq, the latest addition to the roster of America’s forgotten wars, stands as exhibit A. Each bomb that blows up in Baghdad or some other Iraqi city, splattering blood all over the streets, testifies to the manifest absurdity of judging “the surge” as the epic feat of arms celebrated by the Petraeus lobby.

The problems are strategic as well as operational. Old Cold War-era expectations that projecting U.S. power will enhance American clout and standing no longer apply, especially in the Islamic world. There, American military activities are instead fostering instability and inciting anti-Americanism. For Exhibit B, see the deepening morass that Washington refers to as AfPak or the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations.

Add to that the mountain of evidence showing that Pentagon, Inc. is a miserably managed enterprise: hide-bound, bloated, slow-moving, and prone to wasting resources on a prodigious scale — nowhere more so than in weapons procurement and the outsourcing of previously military functions to “contractors.” When it comes to national security, effectiveness (what works) should rightly take precedence over efficiency (at what cost?) as the overriding measure of merit. Yet beyond a certain level, inefficiency undermines effectiveness, with the Pentagon stubbornly and habitually exceeding that level. By comparison, Detroit’s much-maligned Big Three offer models of well-run enterprises.

Impregnable Defenses

All of this takes place against the backdrop of mounting problems at home: stubbornly high unemployment, trillion-dollar federal deficits, massive and mounting debt, and domestic needs like education, infrastructure, and employment crying out for attention.

Yet the defense budget — a misnomer since for Pentagon, Inc. defense per se figures as an afterthought — remains a sacred cow. Why is that?

The answer lies first in understanding the defenses arrayed around that cow to ensure that it remains untouched and untouchable. Exemplifying what the military likes to call a “defense in depth,” that protective shield consists of four distinct but mutually supporting layers.

Institutional Self-Interest: Victory in World War II produced not peace, but an atmosphere of permanent national security crisis. As never before in U.S. history, threats to the nation’s existence seemed omnipresent, an attitude first born in the late 1940s that still persists today. In Washington, fear — partly genuine, partly contrived — triggered a powerful response.

One result was the emergence of the national security state, an array of institutions that depended on (and therefore strove to perpetuate) this atmosphere of crisis to justify their existence, status, prerogatives, and budgetary claims. In addition, a permanent arms industry arose, which soon became a major source of jobs and corporate profits. Politicians of both parties were quick to identify the advantages of aligning with this “military-industrial complex,” as President Eisenhower described it.

Allied with (and feeding off of) this vast apparatus that transformed tax dollars into appropriations, corporate profits, campaign contributions, and votes was an intellectual axis of sorts — government-supported laboratories, university research institutes, publications, think tanks, and lobbying firms (many staffed by former or would-be senior officials) — devoted to identifying (or conjuring up) ostensible national security challenges and alarms, always assumed to be serious and getting worse, and then devising responses to them.

The upshot: within Washington, the voices carrying weight in any national security “debate” all share a predisposition for sustaining very high levels of military spending for reasons having increasingly little to do with the well-being of the country.

Strategic Inertia: In a 1948 State Department document, diplomat George F. Kennan offered this observation: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population.” The challenge facing American policymakers, he continued, was “to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this disparity.” Here we have a description of American purposes that is far more candid than all of the rhetoric about promoting freedom and democracy, seeking world peace, or exercising global leadership.

The end of World War II found the United States in a spectacularly privileged position. Not for nothing do Americans remember the immediate postwar era as a Golden Age of middle-class prosperity. Policymakers since Kennan’s time have sought to preserve that globally privileged position. The effort has been a largely futile one.

By 1950 at the latest, those policymakers (with Kennan by then a notable dissenter) had concluded that the possession and deployment of military power held the key to preserving America’s exalted status. The presence of U.S. forces abroad and a demonstrated willingness to intervene, whether overtly or covertly, just about anywhere on the planet would promote stability, ensure U.S. access to markets and resources, and generally serve to enhance the country’s influence in the eyes of friend and foe alike — this was the idea, at least.

In postwar Europe and postwar Japan, this formula achieved considerable success. Elsewhere — notably in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and (especially after 1980) in the so-called Greater Middle East — it either produced mixed results or failed catastrophically. Certainly, the events of the post-9/11 era provide little reason to believe that this presence/power-projection paradigm will provide an antidote to the threat posed by violent anti-Western jihadism. If anything, adherence to it is exacerbating the problem by creating ever greater anti-American animus.

One might think that the manifest shortcomings of the presence/power-projection approach — trillions expended in Iraq for what? — might stimulate present-day Washington to pose some first-order questions about basic U.S. national security strategy. A certain amount of introspection would seem to be called for. Could, for example, the effort to sustain what remains of America’s privileged status benefit from another approach?

Yet there are few indications that our political leaders, the senior-most echelons of the officer corps, or those who shape opinion outside of government are capable of seriously entertaining any such debate. Whether through ignorance, arrogance, or a lack of imagination, the pre-existing strategic paradigm stubbornly persists; so, too, as if by default do the high levels of military spending that the strategy entails.

Cultural Dissonance: The rise of the Tea Party movement should disabuse any American of the thought that the cleavages produced by the “culture wars” have healed. The cultural upheaval touched off by the 1960s and centered on Vietnam remains unfinished business in this country.

Among other things, the sixties destroyed an American consensus, forged during World War II, about the meaning of patriotism. During the so-called Good War, love of country implied, even required, deference to the state, shown most clearly in the willingness of individuals to accept the government’s authority to mandate military service. GI’s, the vast majority of them draftees, were the embodiment of American patriotism, risking life and limb to defend the country.

The GI of World War II had been an American Everyman. Those soldiers both represented and reflected the values of the nation from which they came (a perception affirmed by the ironic fact that the military adhered to prevailing standards of racial segregation). It was “our army” because that army was “us.”

With Vietnam, things became more complicated. The war’s supporters argued that the World War II tradition still applied: patriotism required deference to the commands of the state. Opponents of the war, especially those facing the prospect of conscription, insisted otherwise. They revived the distinction, formulated a generation earlier by the radical journalist Randolph Bourne, that distinguished between the country and the state. Real patriots, the ones who most truly loved their country, were those who opposed state policies they regarded as misguided, illegal, or immoral.

In many respects, the soldiers who fought the Vietnam War found themselves caught uncomfortably in the center of this dispute. Was the soldier who died in Vietnam a martyr, a tragic figure, or a sap? Who deserved greater admiration: the soldier who fought bravely and uncomplainingly or the one who served and then turned against the war? Or was the war resister — the one who never served at all — the real hero?

War’s end left these matters disconcertingly unresolved. President Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to kill the draft in favor of an All-Volunteer Force, predicated on the notion that the country might be better served with a military that was no longer “us,” only complicated things further. So, too, did the trends in American politics where bona fide war heroes (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain) routinely lost to opponents whose military credentials were non-existent or exceedingly slight (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama), yet who demonstrated once in office a remarkable propensity for expending American blood (none belonging to members of their own families) in places like Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It was all more than a little unseemly.

Patriotism, once a simple concept, had become both confusing and contentious. What obligations, if any, did patriotism impose? And if the answer was none — the option Americans seemed increasingly to prefer — then was patriotism itself still a viable proposition?

Wanting to answer that question in the affirmative — to distract attention from the fact that patriotism had become little more than an excuse for fireworks displays and taking the occasional day off from work — people and politicians alike found a way to do so by exalting those Americans actually choosing to serve in uniform. The thinking went this way: soldiers offer living proof that America is a place still worth dying for, that patriotism (at least in some quarters) remains alive and well; by common consent, therefore, soldiers are the nation’s “best,” committed to “something bigger than self” in a land otherwise increasingly absorbed in pursuing a material and narcissistic definition of self-fulfillment.

In effect, soldiers offer much-needed assurance that old-fashioned values still survive, even if confined to a small and unrepresentative segment of American society. Rather than Everyman, today’s warrior has ascended to the status of icon, deemed morally superior to the nation for which he or she fights, the repository of virtues that prop up, however precariously, the nation’s increasingly sketchy claim to singularity.

Politically, therefore, “supporting the troops” has become a categorical imperative across the political spectrum. In theory, such support might find expression in a determination to protect those troops from abuse, and so translate into wariness about committing soldiers to unnecessary or unnecessarily costly wars. In practice, however, “supporting the troops” has found expression in an insistence upon providing the Pentagon with open-ended drawing rights on the nation’s treasury, thereby creating massive barriers to any proposal to affect more than symbolic reductions in military spending.

Misremembered History: The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism. The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights. The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.

American politics once nourished a lively anti-interventionist tradition. Leading proponents included luminaries such as George Washington and John Quincy Adams. That tradition found its basis not in principled pacifism, a position that has never attracted widespread support in this country, but in pragmatic realism. What happened to that realist tradition? Simply put, World War II killed it — or at least discredited it. In the intense and divisive debate that occurred in 1939-1941, the anti-interventionists lost, their cause thereafter tarred with the label “isolationism.”

The passage of time has transformed World War II from a massive tragedy into a morality tale, one that casts opponents of intervention as blackguards. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the debate over how the United States should respond to some ostensible threat — Iraq in 2003, Iran today — replays the debate finally ended by the events of December 7, 1941. To express skepticism about the necessity and prudence of using military power is to invite the charge of being an appeaser or an isolationist. Few politicians or individuals aspiring to power will risk the consequences of being tagged with that label.

In this sense, American politics remains stuck in the 1930s — always discovering a new Hitler, always privileging Churchillian rhetoric — even though the circumstances in which we live today bear scant resemblance to that earlier time. There was only one Hitler and he’s long dead. As for Churchill, his achievements and legacy are far more mixed than his battalions of defenders are willing to acknowledge. And if any one figure deserves particular credit for demolishing Hitler’s Reich and winning World War II, it’s Josef Stalin, a dictator as vile and murderous as Hitler himself.

Until Americans accept these facts, until they come to a more nuanced view of World War II that takes fully into account the political and moral implications of the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union and the U.S. campaign of obliteration bombing directed against Germany and Japan, the mythic version of “the Good War” will continue to provide glib justifications for continuing to dodge that perennial question: How much is enough?

Like concentric security barriers arrayed around the Pentagon, these four factors — institutional self-interest, strategic inertia, cultural dissonance, and misremembered history — insulate the military budget from serious scrutiny. For advocates of a militarized approach to policy, they provide invaluable assets, to be defended at all costs.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/06 ... acred.html

[blindpig]

Slavery and the fourth of you lie
July 4, 2025 Stephen Millies

The Declaration of Independence is Philadelphia’s proudest claim to fame. It was written by the Virginia slave master and future U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson, who sold his own flesh and blood — the product of his rapes — upon the auction block.

Almost three-quarters of the signers of the declaration were enslavers. Using genocidal language, the document also describes Indigenous peoples defending themselves as “merciless Indian savages.”

The “unalienable rights” that Jefferson’s original draft mentioned were “life, liberty and property.” This expression was lifted from the writings of John Locke, a philosopher of the English capitalist class.

Both John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, members of the declaration’s drafting committee, knew that “the embattled farmers” who had “fired the shot heard round the world” weren’t going to die for the rich man’s property. So they changed this phrase to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”


Danny Glover Reads Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery to become a leader of the Black struggle for freedom, told a Rochester, N.Y., audience in 1852 what “America’s national holiday” meant to millions of enslaved people:


Frederick Douglass
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on this earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

Yet there would be one magnificent Fourth of July. Four score and seven years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, two big Confederate armies would be defeated at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania., and Vicksburg, Mississippi.

These great battles — which culminated on July 4, 1863 — constituted the turning point of the U.S. Civil War. Interestingly, two of the four armies engaged in them were commanded by “Proper Philadelphians.”

Black soldiers need not apply

Gen. George Gordon Meade was the commanding general of the Union Army at Gettysburg. Meade came from a prominent Philadelphia family of merchants who had fallen on hard times. Born in Cádiz, Spain — where his merchant father “moved in the highest social circles” — Meade went to West Point because it was free.

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia invaded the North. While marching through Maryland and Pennsylvania, Lee’s troops kidnapped and enslaved African Americans.

If the Confederates could have seized the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge spanning the Susquehanna at Harrisburg, the East of the Union would have been largely cut off from the Midwest.

Diplomatic recognition of the slave masters’ regime by Britain and France would probably have followed. Large sections of the capitalist class in the North might have thrown in the towel as well.

While Lee and the Confederacy were playing to win, Meade was trying not to lose. Meade originally wanted to withdraw from Gettysburg. After the battle — despite pleas from other Union generals — Meade refused to pursue Lee’s army.

Meade’s unwillingness to go on the offensive wasn’t based on faulty intelligence. Information had been received about demoralization in Confederate ranks and that they had lost a good deal of their artillery. Nor was it a question of personal cowardice.

Even after two years of bloody warfare — and six months after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued — Meade hesitated to destroy the Confederate Army. Along with much of his class, he was still hoping to strike a deal with the slave masters. Lee was allowed to retreat across the Potomac.

While white soldiers in the Union Army at Gettysburg were being slaughtered on Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge, Black soldiers were not allowed to fight beside them. “A company of Black volunteers from Philadelphia who took the train to Harrisburg … were turned back because of their color,” wrote history professor Allen B. Ballard. (New York Times, May 30, 1999)

Jim Dwyer reported that the racist Bally Corporation didn’t want African Americans to buy their shoes. (New York Daily News, Nov. 17, 1996) Here was the United States government prohibiting Black soldiers from dying for it.

Yet Black soldiers and sailors were indispensable for the Union’s victory. Nearly 200,000 Black soldiers fought in the Union Army and a quarter of the Navy was Black. Just for this participation in rescuing the Union from the Confederacy, reparations are owed Black people.

This was also a case of the capitalists fearing their own revolution. For Meade-the-merchant as well as Lee-the-plantation-owner, Black soldiers with guns represented a slave insurrection that could threaten capitalist rule too.

Vince Copeland pointed out this contradiction in his introduction to “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry”:

“The Black regiments were revolutionary in that they struggled against their own and their relatives’ slavery. But their creation and existence was also a subordination of the Black freedom struggle to the discipline of the anti-slave master capitalist class. It was a subordination of the revolutionary Black soldier to the moderate or often only half-revolutionary white Northern officer.”

Philadelphia traitor

The other “Proper Philadelphian” commanding an army that Fourth of July came from a much richer family than Meade’s. Gen. John Clifford Pemberton was a descendant of Israel Pemberton II — the King of the Quakers — who along with Benjamin Franklin had founded the first fire insurance company in the country.

On July 4, 1863, General Pemberton surrendered his besieged Confederate Army to Ulysses S. Grant at Vicksburg. The Confederacy had been split in two.

Lincoln declared that “the father of waters flows unvexed to the sea.” But it took Black troops to help capture Port Hudson a few days later to put the entire Mississippi River in Union hands.

After the war, the traitor Pemberton was welcomed back into the folds of Philadelphia’s capitalist class. He “spent the rest of his life with his sisters and brothers in Proper Philadelphia’s most exclusive rural-suburb of Penllyn,” according to historian E. Digby Baltzell in his book, “An American Business Aristocracy.”

The descendants of these and other Philadelphia capitalist families put fascist Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo in City Hall as mayor from 1972 to 1980 and sent Mumia Abu-Jamal to death row. This class kept the MOVE 9 defendants in jail for 40 years — two of the MOVE 9 died in prison — and is still keeping Mumia incarcerated.

But at least during the Civil War the ranks of Philadelphia’s business elite included the anti-slavery abolitionist Matthias Baldwin, whose factories eventually turned out 50,000 steam locomotives.

New York’s worse record

New York City had a worse record than Philadelphia. Little more than a week after the Battle of Gettysburg, a pro-slavery insurrection broke out in New York City on July 13, 1863. Two orphanages filled with Black children were set on fire. To this day, it’s uncertain how many African Americans were lynched.

This pogrom in Manhattan was no more spontaneous than the protests would be in 1974 in Boston of racists trying to stop busing of schoolchildren to desegregate public schools. Both were the result of racist agitation supported by important sections of the capitalist class. Particularly vicious in 1863 was the New York Herald, the Fox News of its time.

At City Hall Park, New York Gov. Horatio Seymour actually addressed members of this lynch mob as “My Friends!” Behind Seymour — who would be the (pro-slavery) Democratic presidential nominee in 1868 — was a host of millionaires. Among them were the railroad lawyer Samuel Tilden, who later became the Democratic presidential candidate in 1876, and the banker August Belmont, an opponent of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Probably the most important figure on Wall Street at the time, Belmont was head of the Democratic National Committee. He was son-in-law of Louisiana senator and plantation owner John Slidell.

Slidell was described by Civil War historian Bruce Catton as “running” the just pre-Civil War administration of President James Buchanan. Usually considered the worst president in U.S. history, Buchanan’s administration practically turned over army bases to the slave masters.

Slidell also played a major role in setting up the Confederacy. When he was en route to Europe seeking diplomatic recognition for the slave masters, Slidell was taken off a British vessel by a U.S. Navy captain. War almost broke out between the two countries as a result.

None of this harmed Belmont’s reputation within the capitalist class. Belmont Park, just east of New York City, and the Belmont Stakes, part of horse racing’s “triple crown,” are named after him. Belmont’s son became head of New York City’s first subway, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company — the I.R.T.

In 1992 — 129 years after the so-called “Draft Riots” — another racist mob gathered at City Hall Park. Ten thousand mostly drunken cops cheered Rudolph Giuliani as he denounced David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York City. These cops — and campaign contributions from Wall Street — would elect Giuliani as New York’s mayor the following year. Giuliani imposed eight years of increased police terror and kicked a million New Yorkers off public assistance.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... you-lie-2/

[blindpig]

Western Security State Paranoid Schizophrenic Lunacy on Full Display
Roger Boyd
Jul 07, 2025

The Canadian Centre for International Governance Innovation provides a wonderful window into the simplistic thinking and delusional unlinked-from-reality paranoid lunacy of the Western security state apparatus. In this case a report written by Raquel Garbers, a visiting executive from the Canadian Department of National Defence where she was Director General, Strategic Defence Policy. Showing the utter vassalage of the Canadian security state, she is also a visiting practitioner at the US Department of Defense. She was the principal architect of Canada’s utterly lunatic defence policy, Our North, Strong and Free. Supposedly, her areas of expertise include “strategic military effects, geopolitical assessment and grey zone conflict”. Also a frequent public speaker on international affairs.

So let’s start with the introduction to the report, which should immediately qualify the author for a compulsory commitment to a psychological treatment facility with a preliminary diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, “I See Yellow Peril!”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is waging a highly sophisticated campaign of aggression against the United States and its allies. To advance its preferred strategy of “winning without fighting,” it is leveraging its growing military power to openly harass and intimidate other states while simultaneously intensifying its below-threshold attacks on their political, economic and social systems. Intended to strike below the threshold that, if crossed, would provoke a target state to defend itself, Beijing’s belowthreshold attacks are deliberately crafted to hide its fingerprints; obscure its intent; exploit human weakness (greed, fear and so on); and make progress only in small steps (each of which is in itself seemingly inconsequential). Insofar as its use of traditional military coercion and below-threshold attacks together succeed over time in manipulating, corrupting and coercing foreign states — including at the expense of their own national interests — Beijing is effectively ensuring that they will not (or cannot) fight back

Of course the usual giveaway of using the “CCP” instead of the correct name of Communist Party of China (CPC). Exactly which other states is China openly harassing? Can’t be Taiwan, as the United States de jure accepts that it is part of China and not an independent state? Seems that she is trying to say that the CPC is so brilliant, that it can act so invisibly that only the highly attuned likes of Ms. Garbers can see its actions! Perhaps as dastardly as Fu Manchu! With impeccable English accents picked up while undercover in London, and 6 foot 5 in height, taking mind control of innocent Western women to take over the world.



Does she also have friends that we can’t see, or perhaps she sees dead people …



While the CCP’s below-threshold attacks leverage all instruments of national power — diplomatic, information, military and economic — it is especially active in its economic attacks as it understands the symbiotic relationship between economic and military power: in today’s highly integrated global order, economic activities give it easy access to the money, resources, technologies and industrial power it needs to build the coercive military strength that, in turn, backstops its economic (and other below-threshold) attacks.

So the CPC is basically doing what all other nations do, and is just being far too successful in developing its economy. Especially in upgrading the technological capacities of its economy to the point where it now challenges US dominance; competition NOT attacks. Then it has developed its defensive military capabilities to the point that the West cannot subjugate it; in Western 1984-speak making oneself resistant to Western subjugation is an “attack” upon the West. Oh and then there are those invisible “below-threshold” attacks! Yes Ms. Garbers, now swallow those pills that the psychiatrist prescribed and the Yellow Peril will no longer keep you awake at night.

The CCP’s economic warfare has played an important role in shifting global power away from the United States, with the result that fullspectrum war between the world’s major powers is no longer unimaginable. Put simply, the military and economic power gap that the United States and its allies rely on to deter hot war has been eroded. And as deterrence erodes, the risk of hotwar grows (be it by accident or by design).

Converted into non-1984 speak, China has developed to the point where it challenges Western global dominance and exploitation and that is what is driving the Western security state to consider war on China to maintain full spectrum dominance; a war that will only be because of Western aggression.

Against this backdrop, the United States faces a stark choice: make radical reforms at breakneck speed to fight back against the CCP’s “winning without fighting” strategy, or prepare to live in a world where aggressive authoritarian states call the shots. The United States has chosen to fight back, leaving its allies to face their own stark dilemma: how to ready themselves for a new global era defined by the growing risk that China’s economic warfare will trigger a hot war, and by the United States’ mounting determination, with many knock-on implications, to arrest that risk.

So, the US has a choice (i) take away the power of the oligarchs and truly transform itself into a society focused on the many that will need decades to overcome the damage wrought by decades of neoliberalism, or (ii) let the oligarchs continue to rapaciously exploit the rest of the domestic population while becoming more and more aggressive in attempting to kneecap China. In the interim, China is simply economically developing and establishing a wider and wider friendship circle due to the aggression and arrogance of the US and its vassals (such as Canada).

Near the end of the document, Ms. Garbers makes recommendations for Canada, and throws herself into an even greater level of delusional paranoia. The near frothing at the mouth suggests the need for a rabies shot!

To defend itself against attacks from China and reset its relations with the United States on terms that mitigate potential American overreach, Canada must adopt a realistic foreign policy mindset and take bold action. It must be honest with Canadians about the world as it is, expose Beijing’s long history of attacks on Canada and shut down the dangerous recurring fantasies peddled by Beijing’s “friends” about the rewards to be reaped from striking new partnerships with the CCP. It must counter Beijing’s unrelenting efforts to attack Canada and — through us — the United States, and it must be honest about its inescapable co-dependency with the United States. We need the United States just as it needs us: North America is a singular attack surface.

Canada must embrace the southern abuser, because we must love him (Stockholm Syndrome) as a coping mechanism.



And we must fight against the efforts of the Chinese to be “friends” and “help us” with “win win” solutions. Because (US) Abuse is Love, (Chinese) Offers of Help are Attacks, and any (Canadian) Independence would be Subjugation! Otherwise:

If Canada does not act, China will aggress us. The allies will bypass us. And the United States will treat us as a dangerous liability to be forcefully managed.

How did Trudeau’s policy of working so hard to be the United States’ northern poodle work out for Canada? Did it stop the abuse or intensify it?



An abuser only respects strength and deepens the abuse for those that show weakness; most especially those that fight off the attempts of others to form more healthy relationships. We can already see that the Prime Minister from Goldman Sachs only beat his nationalist chest during the election campaign, and is now dutifully carrying out the northern poodle hustle.



Canada is not at war with China, neither is it at war with Russia, Iran or North Korea. Its only main security threat, and the source of widespread domestic political meddling, is the United States. As long as the leaders of Canada listen to the likes of Ms. Garbers, as the current Prime Minister from Goldman Sachs certainly seems inclined to, Canada will continue to waste vast resources on useless war spending and pass up opportunity after opportunity for peaceful development.

She has spent her whole life within the Canadian security state, and displays the psychological issues and Stockholm Syndrome that would be expected from a career within such a xenophobic and paranoid institution that is an utter vassal of the US security state. What Canada needs is people who can think outside the box of Western primacy and US vassalage, not those ideologically trapped within it.

Otherwise the Vassal Dogs of War will be truly having their day, sucking up the resources that could provide real security to be spent on their delusional paranoid fantasies.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/wester ... izophrenic

In a circumstance similar to chicken teeth, Trump was right to call Canada the 51st state. Other than it's technical allegiance to the House of Hanover how does it differ?

[blindpig]

Peace and Development Are Better Than Austerity and War: The Twenty-Ninth Newsletter (2025)

As military rhetoric and spending by the US and its allies continue to intensify, it is clear that the world must stand up and carve out an alternative path – one rooted in peace and development.

17 July 2025


Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba (Côte d’Ivoire), Daloa 29, 2011.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Reason seems to have been gradually abolished by the language of bombs. As weapons systems get ‘smarter’ and ‘smarter’, the range of diplomatic instruments used by the Global North states becomes blunter and blunter. US and European diplomats have returned to the old colonial habit of speaking loudly and brusquely, lecturing the natives about what they should or should not do while they themselves do whatever they want. If the natives do not agree, then the old colonial rulers simply threaten to cut off their hands or bomb their homes.

When the International Criminal Court tried to open a file to investigate US atrocities in Afghanistan, Washington reacted by revoking the prosecutors’ visas and threatening to sanction their families. More recently, the United States government sanctioned UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her report on corporate complicity in the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. This gangster-like behaviour reflects the longstanding attitude of colonial rulers, indicating a return to a period when the West sent its gunboats to threaten our countries to trade as they wanted us to trade rather than to trade as equals. During the colonial period, that form of behaviour was called gunboat diplomacy. What we have now is an updated version: nuclear missile diplomacy.



The 2025 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit at The Hague offers yet another example of this nuclear missile diplomacy. The final communiqué was the shortest produced at any NATO meeting, with only five points, two of which were about money. The Hague Declaration was only 425 words, whereas the Washington Declaration, issued at the 2024 summit, was 5,419 words (44 paragraphs). This time there was no granular detail about this or that threat, nor was there a long and detailed assessment of the war in Ukraine or how NATO supports that war without limit. While the 2024 declaration asserted that ‘Ukraine’s future is in NATO’, this position was nowhere to be found in the 2025 statement. It was clear that the United States simply would not allow a laundry list of NATO’s obsessions. Instead, it was the US obsession that prevailed: that Europe increase its military spending to pay for the US protective shield around the continent.

Under US pressure, NATO states formally agreed to increase their military spending to 5% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2035. Since many NATO members have not even met the previous 2% target, this move will likely spark serious domestic debates across the alliance. By our calculations, as the FACTS graphic above shows, NATO states currently spend $2.7 trillion on war making. As they move to increase military spending to 5% of their GDP, that number will rise to $3.8 trillion – a good $1 trillion more than in previous years.


Hussein Mirghani (Sudan), Untitled, 2019.

What else could be done with $1 trillion? For one, global hunger could be eradicated in twenty to twenty-five years, hunger among children could be eradicated immediately, or the entire $11.4 trillion external debt of developing countries could be paid off in just over a decade. As it stands, the United Nations (UN) has warned that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will not be met by their target year of 2030 and might in fact be delayed by decades, if not a century. One of the most alarming areas of backsliding is SDG 2: Zero Hunger. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that, absent major inflation shocks or geopolitical and geological disruptions, it would take an extra $40 to $50 billion per year to end global hunger. Instead, that money is being spent to blow up food systems rather than build them.

In 2024, global military expenditure reached $3.7 trillion. That same year, the United Nations approved an annual budget of just $3.72 billion (which includes peacekeeping). The UN budget, therefore, is only 0.1% of the global arms budget. It is difficult to look at these figures and not feel the futility of advancing an agenda for peace between peoples and diplomacy between states. There is so much that needs to be solved and yet so little that is being done in this dispensation – however limited – to solve these problems.


Htein Lin (Myanmar), Loudspeaker, 2021.

NATO states agreed to US President Donald Trump’s mandate to increase military spending to 5% of their GDP without any dispute. Because of their various neoliberal debt brakes, they will have to cut social spending in order to pay for their increased arms production and purchases. Germany, which has the largest GDP in Europe, is nonetheless mired in deep social problems; for instance, 21.1% of the German population faces the risk of poverty or social exclusion. The German government, led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has pledged €650 billion over the next five years toward military spending in order to reach the 5% target by 2035 – an amount even the Financial Times finds to be ‘staggering’. To meet this pledge, Germany will need to raise about €144 billion per year, primarily through budget reallocations – i.e., austerity – and increased borrowing – i.e., debt (raising taxes is unlikely, even in the form of regressive value-added taxes on consumption).

In other words, what Europe and the United States have adopted is the path of austerity and war. That is their promise to the world for the period ahead. Meanwhile, at the 17th BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), the BRICS+ countries – which now include Indonesia – opted for a different worldview. The BRICS+ statement called for programmes ‘for the benefit of our people through the promotion of peace, a more representative, fairer international order, a reinvigorated and reformed multilateral system, sustainable development, and inclusive growth’. The key words here are peace and development.

That is the choice that has been laid out before us: austerity and war on the one hand, or development and peace on the other.


Bayan Abu Nahla (Palestine), Break on the Beach, 2023.

Faced with this choice, we rage, we weep, we take to the streets and refuse to allow for any direction other than peace. This was how the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926–1964) felt in 1953 after he was expelled from Iraq for his participation in the failed 1952 Iraqi Intifada against the monarchy. Later that year, in Tehran, he witnessed the CIA-backed coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq from power and restored the Shah of Iran. In 1954, he wrote the long poem ‘Weapons and Children’ (الأسلحة والأطفال). A passage from it is presented below:

‘Iron’
Who is all this iron for?
For a chain twisting around a wrist
A blade held to breast or vein
A key to the prison door for those that are not slaves
A noria that scoops blood.
‘Bullets’
Who are all these bullets for?
For miserable Korean children
Hungry workers in Marseille
The people of Baghdad and the rest
Whoever wants to be saved
Iron
Bullets
Bullets
Bullets
Iron…
I hear the merchant
And the laughing children,
And like the blade before the victim notices,
Like lightning scattered in my mind
Like a screen, like a wound gushing blood –
I see craters rumbling –
Filling the horizon – flames, and blood
Pouring down like rain showers, filling the expanse
Bullets and fire. The face of the sky
Scowls whenever iron shakes it
Iron and fire, fire and iron…
Then the impact, then the bomb!
Thunder everywhere,
Lifeless body parts, and the rubble of a home.
Old iron for a new battle
Iron… to level this waterless desert,
Where children drew in the sand
And where older folks thought it was safe.
‘Peace’
As if the spark in the letters
Is covered over by the darkness of caves,
With the hopes of the first man.
What picture did he inscribe on the stones,
Spurred on by death: is it a victory,
A longing for the best of worlds?

That is the choice: iron or peace, bullets or development. There is no peace through guns, no development through bullets. This is a choice. You must participate in making this choice. Your silence leads to guns and bullets and war; your voice, if it is loud enough alongside the voices of others, might take us to peace and development, the laughter of children as they play without fear in the dusk.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... ato-brics/

[blindpig]

Five-hundred-percent

Lorenzo Maria Pacini

July 22, 2025

What image is America projecting of itself? Once again, one of ridicule.

Please don’t laugh

Okay, okay, okay. Hold on, everyone. There’s a joke to tell: basically, a Republican from South Carolina said that there will be a secondary tariff of 500% (yes, you read that right) on products imported from Russia, with a significant impact on China. All this would be a terrible threat to Moscow from Trump, who has threatened new tariffs against Putin’s Russia as a means of pushing for peace in Ukraine.

Okay, now you can dry your tears from laughing.

Now that we’re back to being serious, we can’t help but comment on these statements.

Let’s start with our first impression: someone should advise Trump and his loyal followers to see a good psychiatrist, who would surely prescribe one of those terrible medicines that are so popular in America, so that he too could finally put a stop to his delusions. Only the US can really think that Russia and China care about them; only Americans can feel so much like the center of the world that they think that the countries that are dominating (read that three times, please) the world can be intimidated by a few trade sanctions.

Not least because these sanctions affect the American people, who cannot do without imported products, and certainly not Russian or Chinese companies, which will continue to sell, even at higher prices and with better profit margins, managing to wipe out some of the competition.

Only a madman could really think that such a measure is good for his country’s economy… unless that madman intends to systematically demolish his country’s entire monetary system. In that case, well done Donald.

Okay, so what?

Trump has promised a 100% secondary tariff if Putin does not end the war within 50 days, but Graham’s bill, introduced alongside Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, would give the president the power to impose much higher tariffs if he deems it appropriate.

China’s massive oil purchases have been a key support for the Russian economy, which has been hit hard by sanctions imposed following the invasion of Ukraine. During a press conference on Tuesday, July 15, Lin Jian, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, reiterated that Beijing’s position on the Ukrainian conflict has remained consistent and transparent: the end of hostilities can only come through dialogue and a negotiated solution. China firmly opposes any unauthorized unilateral sanctions and the use of extraterritorial jurisdiction. A trade war produces no winners, and the use of coercion and pressure does not contribute to the resolution of problems.

America seems not to have understood this warning, so much so that Senator Graham, a few days ago during a live TV broadcast, announced that he and his colleague Blumenthal had gathered the support of 85 senators for the bill they had presented, out of a total of 100 members of the Senate. According to Graham, the legislative proposal would provide Trump with a “powerful tool” to hit the Russian economy hard and also punish those countries that actively contribute to the Kremlin’s war machine.

China, India, and Brazil continue to import oil, oil derivatives, and other products from Russia. It is precisely these funds that allow Putin to sustain the conflict, according to Republican senators. The proposed package of measures would give former President Trump maximum discretion in imposing secondary tariffs, allowing him to apply tariffs ranging from zero to 500% on countries that trade with Moscow and thus indirectly support its military aggression.

In addition to the new sanctions, Trump has also promised to send more Patriot missile systems to Ukraine to strengthen its air defense, stressing that European allies will bear the costs of supplying high-tech American weapons, thereby increasing pressure on Putin to agree to a truce. Meanwhile, Russia has intensified its air strikes against Ukrainian cities, using drones and missiles, while massing troops along the border and advancing into the eastern regions of the country. Moscow’s continued and growing military commitment has irritated Trump, who is trying to foster a diplomatic agreement to end the hostilities, and has led him to express direct criticism of the Russian president.

The crazy thing is that the proposal was also embraced by the European Commission when Ursula Von der Leyen met with Graham in Berlin back in June. The rhetoric of “breaking Russia’s back” continues to hover among the halls of Western power, yet no one seems to have realized yet that it is a gigantic falsehood. The disastrous sanctions that have reduced Europe to a rag to be thrown away were not enough; now we need these new tariffs. They are now a tool that does not even work psychologically. Everything is clear, everything is increasingly poor.

Trump has made extensive use of tariffs to advance his foreign policy agenda—as he did in his first administration—but their implementation has been uneven. The 145% tariffs on China, imposed in April, lasted a month before being drastically reduced to make way for trade negotiations, which have so far failed to secure a breakthrough. As it stands, the bill includes some levers that Trump could pull to prevent the tariffs from being applied, requiring the president to formally declare that Russia refuses to negotiate or has violated any future peace agreement.

Technically, it is unlikely that the Senate and House of Representatives will have time to vote on the Graham-Blumenthal bill before the summer recess, which will keep Congress in recess until September 1. And September 2 is the deadline for the 50-day extension granted by Trump on sanctions, but Congress will have to urgently address the budget in order to approve it by October 1 and not freeze the government’s work, not until the sanctions. This is a typical American political tactic of “postponing thorny issues until better times,” counting on a change in the agenda or a reduction in the urgency of the issue and, at the same time, an attempt to preserve room for maneuver, avoiding an immediate escalation of relations with Russia’s major trading partners, such as China and India.

If anyone thinks that because Trump said 50 days, then in 50 days there will definitely be sanctions, they are mistaken. It is not necessary at all. Trump said he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. So, did he do it?

Enjoy the rest of the show. Meanwhile, China and Russia are set to see their GDP rise again in 2025 and are looking forward to 2026 with enthusiasm and freedom.

What image is America projecting of itself? Once again, one of ridicule. Instead of addressing the internal collapse and social issues that continue to plague domestic health, the US government is trying to impress the whole world by acting tough. 500% is an unsustainable figure from every point of view. Only an American cowboy could make such a grandiose claim.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... d-percent/

[blindpig]

William Hartung: The Military-Industrial Complex Is Riding High
July 23, 2025
By William Hartung, Antiwar.com, 7/2/25

Originally published at TomDispatch.

The Senate is on the verge of passing the distinctly misnamed “big beautiful bill.” It is, in fact, one of the ugliest pieces of legislation to come out of Congress in living memory. The version that passed the House recently would cut $1.7 trillion, mostly in domestic spending, while providing the top 5% of taxpayers with roughly $1.5 trillion in tax breaks.

Over the next few years, the same bill will add another $150 billion to a Pentagon budget already soaring towards a record $1 trillion. In short, as of now, in the battle between welfare and warfare, the militarists are carrying the day.

Pentagon Pork and the People It Harms

The bill, passed by the House of Representatives and at present under consideration in the Senate, would allocate tens of billions of dollars to pursue President Trump’s cherished but hopeless Golden Dome project, which Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has described as “a fantasy.” She explained exactly why the Golden Dome, which would supposedly protect the United States against nuclear attack, is a pipe dream:

“Over the last 60 years, the United States has spent more than $350 billion on efforts to develop a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. This effort has been plagued by false starts and failures, and none have yet been demonstrated to be effective against a real-world threat… Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the U.S. safe from nuclear weapons.”

The bill also includes billions more for shipbuilding, heavy new investments in artillery and ammunition, and funding for next-generation combat aircraft like the F-47.

Oh, and after all of those weapons programs get their staggering cut of that future Pentagon budget, somewhere way down at the bottom of that list is a line item for improving the quality of life for active-duty military personnel. But the share aimed at the well-being of soldiers, sailors, and airmen (and women) is less than 6% of the $150 billion that Congress is now poised to add to that department’s already humongous budget. And that’s true despite the way Pentagon budget hawks invariably claim that the enormous sums they routinely plan on shoveling into it — and the overflowing coffers of the contractors it funds — are “for the troops.”

Much of the funding in the bill will flow into the districts of key members of Congress (to their considerable political benefit). For example, the Golden Dome project will send billions of dollars to companies based in Huntsville, Alabama, which calls itself “Rocket City” because of the dense network of outfits there working on both offensive missiles and missile defense systems. And that, of course, is music to the ears of Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), the current chair of the House Armed Services Committee, who just happens to come from Alabama.

The shipbuilding funds will help prop up arms makers like HII Corporation (formerly Huntington Ingalls), which runs a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the home state of Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss). The funds will also find their way to shipyards in Maine, Connecticut, and Virginia.

Those funds will benefit the co-chairs of the House Shipbuilding Caucus, Representative Joe Courtney (D-CT) and Representative Rob Wittman (R-VA). Connecticut hosts General Dynamics’ Electric Boat plant, which makes submarines that carry ballistic missiles, while Virginia is home to HII Corporation’s Newport News Shipbuilding facility, which makes both aircraft carriers and attack submarines.

The Golden Dome missile defense project, on which President Trump has promised to spend $175 billion over the next three years, will benefit contractors big and small. Those include companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon (now RTX) that build current generation missile defense systems, as well as emerging military tech firms like Elon Musk’s Space X and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, both of which are rumored to have a shot at playing a leading role in the development of the new anti-missile system.

And just in case you thought this country was only planning to invest in defense against a nuclear strike, a sharp upsurge in spending on new nuclear warheads under the auspices of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) has been proposed for fiscal year 2026. Thirty billion dollars, to be exact, which would represent a 58% hike from the prior year’s budget. Meanwhile, within that agency, nonproliferation, cleanup, and renewable energy programs are set to face significant cuts, leaving 80% of NNSA’s proposed funding to be spent on — yes! — nuclear weapons alone. Those funds will flow to companies like Honeywell, Bechtel, Jacobs Engineering, and Fluor that help run nuclear labs and nuclear production sites, as well as educational institutions like the University of Tennessee, Texas A&M, and the University of California at Berkeley, which help manage nuclear weapons labs or nuclear production sites.

Weakening the Social Safety Net — and America

And while weapons contractors will gorge on a huge new infusion of cash, military personnel, past and present, are clearly going to be neglected. As a start, the Veterans Administration is on the block for deep cuts, including possible layoffs of up to 80,000 employees — a move that would undoubtedly slow down the processing of benefits for those who have served in America’s past wars. Research on ailments that disproportionately impact veterans will also be cut, which should be considered an outrage.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of veterans from this country’s disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will continue to suffer from physical and psychological wounds, including traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Cutting research that might find more effective solutions to such problems should be considered a national disgrace. In the meantime, active-duty personnel who are getting a tiny fraction of the potential Pentagon add-on of $150 billion are similarly in need.

Worse yet, turn away from the Pentagon for a moment, and the cuts in the rest of that “big beautiful bill” will likely have an impact on a majority of Americans — Democrats, independents, and MAGA Republicans alike. Their full effects may not be felt for months until the spending reductions contained in it start hitting home. However, enacting policies that take food off people’s tables and deny them medical care will not only cause unnecessary suffering but cost lives.

As President (and former general) Dwight D. Eisenhower, a very different kind of Republican, said more than 70 years ago, the ultimate security of a nation lies not in how many weapons it can pile up, but in the health, education, and resilience of its people. The big beautiful bill and the divisive politics surrounding it threaten those foundations of our national strength.

Clash of the Contractors?

As budget cuts threaten to make the population weaker, distorted spending priorities are making arms producers stronger. The Big Five — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — produce most of the current big-ticket weapon systems, from submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles to tanks, combat aircraft, and missile-defense systems. Meanwhile, emerging tech firms like Palantir, Anduril, and Space X are cashing in on contracts for unpiloted vehicles, advanced communications systems, new-age goggles for the Army, anti-drone systems, and so much more.

But even as weapons spending hits near-record or record levels, there may still be a fight between the Big Five and the emerging tech firms over who gets the biggest share of that budget. One front in the coming battle between the Big Five and the Silicon Valley militarists could be the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI). According to Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, one of the goals of ATI is to “eliminate obsolete systems.”

Driscoll is a harsh critic of the way members of Congress put money in the budget — a process known as “pork barrel politics” — for items the military services haven’t even asked for (and they ask for plenty), simply because those systems might bring more jobs and revenue to their states or districts. He has, in fact, committed himself to an approach that’s incompatible with the current, parochial process of putting together the Pentagon budget. “Lobbyists and bureaucrats have overtaken the army’s ability to prioritize soldiers and war fighting,” he insisted.

Driscoll is talking a tough game when it comes to taking on the existing big contractors. He’s evidently ready to push for “reform,” even if it means that some of them go out of business. In fact, he seems to welcome it: “I will measure it as success if, in the next two years, one of the primes is no longer in business.” (“Primes” are the big contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics that take the lead on major programs and get the bulk of the funding, a significant portion of which they dole out to subcontractors all over the country and the world.)

Ending pork-barrel politics in favor of an approach in which the Pentagon only buys systems that align with the country’s actual defense strategy, as Driscoll is suggesting, might seem like a significant step forward. But be careful what you wish for. Any funds freed up by stopping congressional representatives from treating the Pentagon budget as a piggy bank to buy loyalty from their constituents will almost certainly go to emerging tech firms ready to build next-generation systems like swarms of drones, weapons that can take out a hypersonic missile, or pilotless land vehicles, aircraft, and ships. Driscoll is a major tech enthusiast, as is his friend and Yale law school classmate J.D. Vance, who was first employed by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who then backed his successful run for the Senate from Ohio.

Since the tech firms don’t have the equivalent of the Big Five’s extensive production networks in key congressional districts, they need to find other ways to persuade Congress to fund their weapons programs. Fortunately, the Silicon Valley militarists have a significant number of former employees or financial backers in the Trump administration who can plead their case.

In addition, military-tech-focused venture capital firms have hired at least 50 former Pentagon and military officials, all of whom can help them exert influence over both the Trump administration and Congress. The biggest “catch” was Palantir’s hiring of former Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher, who had run the hawkish Congressional special committee on Communist China.

Some journalists and policy analysts have wondered whether the feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk will hurt the military tech sector. Well, stop fretting. Even if Trump were to follow through on his threat to cut the government funding of Musk’s firms, the tasks they’re carrying out — from launching military satellites to developing more secure Internet access for deployed military personnel — would still proceed, just under the auspices of different companies. There would be some friction involved, simply because it’s hard to shift suppliers on a dime without slowing down production. And the transition, should it occur, would also add cost to already exceedingly expensive programs.

But Trump’s threat to cancel Space X’s contracts may just be more grist for his verbal combat with Musk rather than anything his administration plans to follow through on. Even if Musk and his president never reconcile, the DOGE cuts to international diplomacy and domestic social services that Musk spearheaded will still do serious damage for years to come.

Money Can’t Buy Security

A shift toward emerging military tech firms and away from the Big Five will be about more than money and technology. Key figures among the growing cohort of Silicon Valley militarists like Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, see building weapons as more than just a necessary pillar of national defense. They see it as a measure of national character.

Karp’s new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, mixes the Cold War ideology of the 1950s with the emerging technology of the twenty-first century. He decries the lack of unifying concepts like “the West” and sees too many Americans as slackers with no sense of national pride or patriotism. His solution, a supposedly unifying national mission, is — wait for it! — a modern Manhattan project for the development of the military applications of artificial intelligence. To say that this is an impoverished version of what this country’s mission should be is putting it mildly. Many other possibilities come to mind, from addressing climate change to preventing pandemics to upgrading our educational system to building a society where everyone’s basic needs are met, leaving room for creative pursuits of all kinds.

The techno-optimists are also obsessed with preparing for a war with China, which Palmer Luckey, the 32-year-old founder of the military tech firm Anduril, believes will happen by 2027. And many in his circle, including Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, are convinced that any potential risks from the development of AI pale in comparison to the need to “beat China,” not just in getting to sophisticated military applications first, but in winning a future war with Beijing, if it comes to that. Talk of diplomacy to head off a war over Taiwan or cooperation on global issues like climate change, outbreaks of disease, and building a more inclusive, less unequal global economy rarely come up in discussions among the hardcore militarist faction in Silicon Valley. Instead, that group is spending inordinate amounts of time and money seeking to influence the future of U.S. foreign and military policy, a dangerous development indeed.

Whether the emerging tech firms can build cheaper weapons with superior capabilities will be irrelevant if such developments are tied to an aggressive strategy that makes a devastating conflict with China more likely. While the fight between the Big Five and the tech leaders may prove interesting to observe, it is also ominous in terms of this country’s future economic and foreign policies, not to speak of the shape and size of our national budget.

The rest of us, who aren’t billionaires and don’t draw $20 million in annual compensation packages like the CEOs of the big weapons firms (directly or indirectly funded by our tax dollars), should play a leading role in rethinking and revising this country’s global role and our policies at home. If we don’t rise to that challenge, this country could end up swapping one form of militarism, led by the Big Five, for another, spearheaded by hawkish, self-important tech leaders who care more about making money and spawning devastating new technologies than they do about democracy or the quality of life of the average American.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/07/wil ... ding-high/

******

(Too many of my fellow Boomers think our generation was the crown of creation, this excerpt from an essay I do not entirely agree with begs to differ. )

Which is probably where things really went off the rails. The Boomers should never have been allowed in those offices, especially the ones within ten miles of Wall Street. That’s where the cleverest among us came up with the signal innovations that have now wrecked the world. The corona virus is a very bad thing, for sure, but it’s really nothing compared to the deliberate wickedness that engineered the so-called financialized economy — a supernatural matrix of something-for-nothing swindles and frauds that purported to replace actual work that produced things of value. The great lesson of the age was lost: the virtual is not a substitute for the authentic.

And now the Boomer geniuses of finance are scrambling frantically to hurl imaginary money into the black hole they have opened with their own reckless wizardry. But black holes are nothing like ordinary holes. They are unfillable. They just suck everything into a cosmic vacuum that resembles something like death — which, in its implacable mystery, may just be a door to a new disposition of things, the next life, the next reality.

Of course, not all of us Boomers worked on Wall Street or in its annexes, but we did more or less go along with all that wickedness because we never really made any earnest effort to stop it. The Dodd-Frank bill? Don’t make me laugh. Maybe it’s just impossible to apologize for the mess we left behind after the party we enjoyed. I’m not a Christian in any formal sense, but perhaps only that kind of fathomless, unconditional forgiveness might avail. I am sincerely sorry.

https://www.kunstler.com/p/boomer-elegy ... ion-search

In truth we are the result of what came before, and it is equally true that we were manipulated to become the present. Which does not let us off the hook, that 'agency' thing does exist, however constrained by the Children of Bernays. The transition from social change to individual improvement, the logic of a puerile degenerate anarchism... 'Revolution For The Hell Of It' say it all.

[blindpig]

Riot and reaction in California: a class war by any other name

The ultimate strategy of the state is to divide the working class: to pit documented against undocumented, white against black, native-born against immigrant.
Lalkar writers

Tuesday 1 July 2025


Theatrical and violent immigration raids have nothing to do with legality or security – their aim is to help maintain a pool of hyperexploitable workers with limited rights, so profits can remain high and working-class resistance can be kept low.

In early June 2025, a series of state-led immigration raids triggered widespread protests and clashes in Los Angeles and other US cities. Federal agents from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raided a warehouse complex in the Fashion district and several Home Depot parking lots in southern California. Over 260 undocumented workers were detained, prompting immediate resistance from surrounding communities.

By 5 June, demonstrations had erupted in downtown LA, with solidarity marches in Chicago, New York and Houston. According to local reports, more than 70 protesters were injured and nearly 150 arrested. Video footage circulated widely on social media showed police using tear gas, rubber bullets and kettling tactics against demonstrators.

California is home to the USA’s largest population of undocumented people. Some 1.8 million were in the state in 2022, the Pew research centre estimates, 800,000 of them in Los Angeles County, making up more than 8 percent of its total population. About 53 percent are from neighbouring Mexico, with sizeable proportions from El Salvador, Guatemala and the Philippines. They work in agriculture and construction, in restaurants and the service industry, in day labour and landscaping – often for pay that is ad hoc and ‘off the books’.

Los Angeles is a so-called ‘sanctuary city’, meaning the city has policies in place to protect undocumented immigrants from federal immigration enforcement. This includes prohibiting the use of city resources and personnel for immigration enforcement purposes and limiting the sharing of data with federal immigration authorities.

Its sanctuary status stems from a long-standing 1960s commitment to protect immigrants, but don’t be fooled – such protections are not altruistic. They undoubtedly enable the state to achieve the highest nominal gross domestic product (GDP) among all US states owing to the prevalence of extremely low wages.

The unrest in LA underscores the deepening political divide over immigration and the role of sanctuary cities in the USA. While Californian officials argue for the protection of immigrant communities and local autonomy, and the continuance of local exploitation practices, the federal government is asserting its authority to enforce federal immigration laws.

Mainstream media outlets framed the unrest in highly partisan (ie, culture wars) terms. Fox News emphasised “mob violence” and framed the protests as attacks on law enforcement and national sovereignty. CNN and MSNBC, while slightly more sympathetic to the protestors, emphasised the “chaotic response” of the Trump-aligned ICE directorate and portrayed the events as a breakdown in governance rather than as a systemic conflict rooted in class exploitation. Across the board, none of the corporate media outlets questioned the logic of immigration enforcement itself – they debated only the related optics and operational efficiency.

This latest wave of US state repression must be understood not as an isolated policy error, or the maniacal tactics of a fascistic despot who has somehow ‘taken control’ of an otherwise ‘democratic’ America, but as the deliberate deployment of violence to maintain capitalist class relations – a continuity of the existing modus operandi; the implementation of new tactics supporting the same old strategy.

It is through this lens that we now analyse the recent LA riots and the dynamics at play which they reflect.

Trump plays to his core supporters with anti-immigration rhetoric
US president Donald Trump’s performative cruelty on immigration – marked by televised raids, concentration camps for children and bombastic rhetoric – is not a deviation from US state policy but its logical extension. His repeated calls to “restore order” and “defend the border” have nothing to do with national security – they are class war by another name.

President Trump is reminding his reactionary base and the capitalist class that he can keep cheap migrant labour frightened, fragmented and docile, while simultaneously feeding white nationalist sentiment. But what is often missed is that Trump is not inventing this violence – he is merely administering it with less finesse.

The liberal response – framing Trump as uniquely fascist – is a sleight of hand. The Democratic party and its media supporters posture as defenders of human rights, yet the administration of former president Barack Obama deported more people than any US presidency in history – over 3 million, earning Obama the nickname, ‘Deporter-in-chief’.

Democratic president Joe Biden’s record was a continuity of this agenda, not a rupture. Deportations, raids, walls, cages – these are bipartisan tools of a capitalist state tasked with managing the labour supply, protecting the extraction of surplus value, and suppressing working-class organisation and resistance.

When Democrats cry foul, it is not out of solidarity with migrants but to obscure the fact that cheap migrant labour, a malleable workforce and state repression are not a Republican problem – they reflect capitalist necessity and continue under all bourgeois governments.

Bourgeois theatre: Republican v Democrat
The political theatre between Republicans and Democrats is designed to trap the working masses into endless tribal conflicts that ultimately change nothing. Each ‘side’ accuses the other of tyranny while preserving the same class relations.

This division saps revolutionary energy and channels proletarian anger into electoral politics – a terrain where the bourgeoisie always wins.

The ruling class presents two masks, but behind both is the same face: capital. Both presidential candidates are funded by the same elite, so regardless of the outcome, it’s a win-win for the status quo.

Resistance and repression
Immigrant workers have pushed back – protesting, striking and sometimes physically resisting ICE raids. These are not mere immigration issues; they are class conflicts.

Their resistance is not about national identity but survival under capitalism – where the local exploitation of undocumented workers by capitalist enterprises is essential to maintaining profitability.

The raids don’t target capitalists employing undocumented workers – they target the workers themselves. The locations of the recent raids reveal the truth: capital demands cheap, disposable labour, and the state’s role is to manage that process through fear and repression.

This is not about legality or security – it’s about maintaining a pool of hyperexploitable workers with limited rights, so profits can remain high and resistance can be kept low.

Divide and rule
The ultimate strategy of the state – whether fronted up by a Republican or Democrat White House regime – is to divide the working class: to pit documented against undocumented, white against black, native-born against immigrant.

The riots, the spectacle, the partisan outrage – these are diversions. They prevent us from seeing the simple, undeniable truth: that there are only two sides. Not Democrat versus Republican, not liberal versus conservative, not white versus brown, not legal versus illegal, but bourgeoisie versus proletariat, ruling class versus working class.

Until the working class clearly sees the enemy for who it is – the capitalist class and the imperialist state apparatus – there will be no end to exploitation, deportations, raids and repression. Donald Trump is not the problem. Neither was Joe Biden or those who came before. The system of capitalism is the problem.

We must reject the false divisions sold to us by media and mainstream politics. The working class must unite across all lines – citizenship, race, gender or status – and recognise that our common enemy is the system that exploits, divides and disciplines us all.

The streets are not burning because of one man’s presidency. They are burning because the capitalist state is waging war on the proletariat. Whether it wears a red tie or a blue one, the ruling class cannot be reformed – it must be overthrown.

https://thecommunists.org/2025/07/01/ne ... class-war/