The Nature of Foxes

[blindpig]

The use of the bomb is "not necessary"
February 25, 16:55



The Pentagon's Big Lie: Why the US Really Dropped Atomic Bombs on Japan

Interestingly, a 1985 Washington Post article ( https://t.me/darpaandcia/518?comment=2626

) ended up in the CIA archives — the intelligence agency was clearly monitoring publications that refuted the official version of the need for atomic bombings. Author Gar Alperovitz reveals an inconvenient truth: the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a military necessity, but the first step in the Cold War against the USSR. For decades, the Americans justified the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the need to prevent a bloody invasion of the Japanese islands. The official version claimed that the bombing saved up to a million American lives. However, documents prove that this was just a convenient legend.

By the summer of 1945, Japan was already on the verge of surrender. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff reported that strategic bombing and the naval blockade had already "made millions of Japanese homeless and destroyed between 25 and 50 percent of the urban sprawl of Japan's major cities."
American intelligence had been intercepting Japanese messages expressing a desire to surrender since September 1944.

Particularly revealing is the entry in Truman's diary, where he himself calls an intercepted telegram "a message from the Japanese Emperor asking for peace." Secretary of the Navy Forrestal noted in his diary "tangible evidence of the Japanese desire to withdraw from the war."

The Japanese minister in Switzerland, Kase, openly expressed "a desire to help arrange an end to hostilities." The only obstacle to surrender was the US demand for unconditional surrender - Japan only wanted to preserve the institution of the emperor.

Amazingly, the top US military leadership did not consider the atomic bombing necessary:

​​Admiral Leahy, the President's Chief of Staff:
"At the present time... the surrender of Japan can be arranged on terms that Japan can accept."

General Eisenhower told Truman bluntly that the use of the bomb was "not necessary."

Admiral King believed that a naval blockade would ensure unconditional surrender without invasion.

General Arnold argued that unconditional surrender could be achieved by October by conventional means.

Key to the decision was Secretary of State James Byrnes, Truman's chief adviser on both diplomacy and the atomic bomb. It was he who insisted on "finishing the Japanese business before the Russians entered the war."

Scholar Leo Szilard, who met with Byrnes on May 28, 1945, recalled:
"Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against Japanese cities to win the war."
Instead, Byrnes was concerned about Russia's postwar behavior and believed that"Russia will be easier to govern if she is impressed with American military power."

Stimson wrote in his diary after a conversation with Byrnes at the White House:
"He is very much against any attempt to cooperate with Russia. His mind is full of the problems of the coming meeting of Foreign Ministers, and he counts on having the bomb in his pocket, so to speak, as a great weapon."

Truman deliberately delayed negotiations with Stalin until after the test of the atomic bomb. After the successful test on July 16, 1945, Churchill noticed a dramatic change in Truman's demeanor: "He told the Russians where to stand and sit, and generally commanded the whole conference."

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not so much a military necessity as the opening move in the Cold War. America deliberately sacrificed 130,000 Japanese lives to demonstrate its new strength to the Soviet Union.

As Churchill later noted:
"The historical fact remains, and must be assessed in the future, that the decision to use or not to use the atomic bomb... was never even a question."
The decision was made long before all the alternatives were considered.

https://t.me/darpaandcia - zinc

Actually, Stalin understood this game very well, so during the famous episode in Potsdam he took into account Truman's veiled threats related to the atomic bomb and ordered the acceleration of the implementation of the Soviet nuclear project, which in a short time under Beria's leadership was brought to a finished product.

However, the Japanese will bashfully remain silent at official events about who dropped nuclear bombs on them, so...

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9691632.html

Twenty years ago I was on Democratic Underground, which during one of the periodic nadirs of the Dems welcomed leftists. I very much recall how Harry Truman was held up as a great president by the liberals. Yes the buck stops there...

[blindpig]

Imperialism’s revival strategy

By Prabhat Patnaik (Posted Mar 03, 2025)

Originally published: Peoples Democracy on March 2, 2025 (more by Peoples Democracy) |

DONALD Trump’s foreign policy has left commentators in a real tizzy. His markedly differing positions with regard to Ukraine and Gaza, in the first case apparently pursuing peace, and in the second asking for ethnic cleansing of an entire population, have left them wondering whether his influence on world affairs is a “positive” one or not. The reason for such bemusement however lies not in anything that Trump has done, but in not cognizing the phenomenon of imperialism. There can be little doubt that western imperialism led by the U.S. had pushed itself into a corner, where the choice was between either a disastrous escalation of the war in Ukraine even to the point of a nuclear confrontation, or a gradual erosion of imperialist hegemony. Donald Trump is attempting to extricate imperialism from such an impossibly tricky corner. The point is not whether he is “for peace” or “for war” or whether he is mindful of European interests or not; the point is that he is pursuing an alternative imperialist strategy that would rescue imperialism from this cul-de-sac, and he is in a position to do so because he is untainted by the earlier policy that created this cul-de-sac in the first place.

His method for re-asserting imperialist hegemony that was getting gradually eroded is a combination of carrot and stick. The basic assumption that underlay the provocation that produced the Ukraine war, namely that Russia can be made to surrender to western dictates as a result of it, has been proven false. Not only is it the case that Ukraine has been steadily losing ground during the war, but the economic sanctions against Russia that were supposed to “reduce the rouble to rubble” were totally counter-productive; the rouble, after a brief temporary fall, recovered to a level vis-à-vis the dollar that was even higher than before the sanctions, and, what is more, these sanctions produced a reaction where a challenge to the hegemony of the dollar came onto the agenda.

The Kazan summit of the BRICS countries posed “de-dollarisation” as a serious possibility. Unilateral imperialist sanctions, as long as they are directed against a few small countries can be quite effective; but when they target a large number of countries and that too countries as large, as developed, and as resource-rich, as Russia, they not only lose their effectiveness as sanctions, but encourage the formation of a bloc of countries arrayed against the entire dominant imperial arrangement that passes as the international economic order, and this alternative tends to draw into its fold even non-sanctioned countries.

This is exactly what has been happening and what Trump faced when he came to office. The stick part of his carrot-and-stick method is well-known. He threatened to impose heavy tariffs against countries that went in for de-dollarisation, which is a blatant imperialist act and against all rules of the capitalist game; after all any country according to these rules has the freedom to trade in any currency it likes provided its trading partner is willing, and also to hold its wealth in any currency that it fancies. To curtail that freedom by imposing high tariffs against such a country is blatant arm-twisting that no international order can explicitly endorse; but Trump as an open and unrelenting imperialist had no qualms about exercising such economic coercion quite explicitly.

His attempt to bring about an end to the Ukraine war is the carrot in this carrot-and-stick method. Instead of an alternative power bloc being formed against the U.S. and against western imperialism in general, an end to this war on terms that are not unfavourable to Russia will keep Russia out of any such alternative bloc. It will thereby undermine the on-going attempts at challenging imperialist hegemony.

Of course any end to the Ukraine war based on negotiations should be welcomed by all, but seeing this end as the outcome of a desire for peace, or as the pursuit of U.S. interests at the expense of European “security concerns”, is wholly erroneous. Trump is not on a peace mission, otherwise he would not have made the utterly belligerent remarks about Gaza; indeed capitalism is by its very nature against peace: as the French socialist Jean Jaures had famously remarked “Capitalism carries war within it, just like clouds carry rain”. It is a desire to put imperialist hegemony on a better footing that motivates Trump not a desire for peace. Likewise the question of European security is a complete red herring: European security was never threatened by Russia, and all talk of a threat of “Russian imperialism” overrunning Europe was just an excuse to justify NATO expansionism. So, there is no question of European security being undermined by Trump’s peace move.

Trump’s difference from the European ruling cliques arises on account of two different alternative strategies that imperialism can pursue at present. One is the old Biden strategy of aggression against Russia that had run into a cul-de-sac; and the other is an alternative strategy of ending the Ukraine war and weaning Russia away from an oppositional bloc against the hegemony of western imperialism. European rulers are wedded to the former while Trump is attempting the latter. One has to see the opposition of the neo-Nazi AfD in Germany to the Ukraine war in exactly the same terms: its extreme aggressiveness vis-à-vis Palestine in contrast to its desire for an end to the Ukraine war, is symptomatic neither of any general desire for peace nor of an unconcern for “European security”, but of a certain strategic position.

Of course Trump’s project of extricating imperialism from the corner to which it has been driven, is simultaneously a project of assertion of U.S. hegemony over the imperialist bloc as a whole. His slogan “Make America Great Again” is a project of recreating a world unquestioningly dominated by western imperialism with the U.S. as its unquestioned leader. It is a continuation in this sense of the strategy of making Europe dependent upon American energy sources that had been represented by the blowing up of Nord Stream II gas pipeline from Russia to Europe, allegedly by the U.S. “Deep State”.

There is however a major contradiction in Trump’s strategy. There is a price to be paid for “leadership” of the capitalist world; and Trump wants a “leadership” role for the U.S. without paying this price. The price is the following: the “leader” must tolerate trade deficits vis-à-vis other major capitalist powers in order to accommodate their ambitions and prevent the capitalist world as a whole from sinking into a crisis. This is what Britain had done during the years of its “leadership” and this is what the U.S. has been doing in the more recent period. Britain’s running a trade deficit vis-à-vis Continental Europe and the U.S. who were the other major powers at that time did not hurt it because it balanced this deficit, among other things, by claiming a surplus of invisible earnings vis-à-vis its colonial empire, the bulk of which was a cooked up surplus against which it extracted a “drain” from these colonies of conquest, with which it settled its deficit with other major capitalist powers.

Post-war U.S. however has not been in a similar “fortunate” position; its running a trade deficit vis-à-vis other major powers has made it sink deeper and deeper into debt. Its attempt to avoid getting even deeper into debt, which is a part of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” project and for which he is in the process of imposing tariffs against all its trading partners, in a situation where the overall demand in the capitalist world economy is not expanding because of the pressure from globalised finance capital to shun fiscal deficits and taxation of the rich for enlarging government expenditure everywhere, will only accentuate the world capitalist crisis, with a particularly heavy burden falling on the non-US capitalist world.

The Trump strategy for the revival of imperialism therefore amounts to having one’s cake and eating it too. His attempt to assert U.S. leadership while seeking to impose tariffs on others amounts to a “beggar-thy-neighbour” policy vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Such a “beggar-thy-neighbour” policy, which amounts to ensuring growth for oneself by snatching markets from others, is fundamentally inimical to the project of reasserting imperialist hegemony. If Biden had pushed imperialism into one corner, Trump’s extrication of it from that corner will only lead to its being pushed into another corner.

https://mronline.org/2025/03/03/imperia ... -strategy/

[blindpig]

Revolt of the Rich: Wealthy Elites Have Waged A Fifty Year Class War—and Won
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - March 7, 2025 1


[Source: the comicnews.com]

The 2024 election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump makes clear that the U.S. has two right-wing parties and no effective left-wing opposition.

Trump and the GOP support regressive tax policies and fervent anti-immigrant measures while the Democrats offer a Republican-light domestic economic program combined with hawkish foreign policies that earned Kamala Harris the endorsement of neo-conservative hardliner Dick Cheney.

With both parties competing to screw over working class people, culture war issues have become determinant in elections over the past generation, with the Democrats embracing identity politics in an attempt to mask their commitment to advancing corporate interests almost as egregiously as the GOP.

David Gibbs’s new book Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide argues that the roots of today’s dystopian political landscape lie in the successful strategies of wealthy businessmen in the 1970s.[1]


[Source: amazon.com]

Prior to that time, a social compact prevailed under the New Deal order, lasting roughly from 1932 to 1968, by which the power of corporations was curtailed to some extent by unions and economic policies were adopted by governing elites that contributed to middle-class growth.

Designed largely to avert the prospect of social revolution in the Great Depression, these policies included regulation of the banking structure under Glass-Steagall, progressive income tax rates, a relatively robust social safety net, laws granting unions organizing and collective bargaining rights, and government commitment to funding public education.

After some of the first New Deal measures were passed, J.P. Morgan, the DuPont family and wealthy Texas oil barons funded the Liberty League, which flooded the country with incendiary propaganda accusing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of bringing socialism to the U.S., and tried to unseat him in a coup.

The coup failed and, when Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, became president in the 1950s, he preserved core New Deal programs.


[Source: posterazzi.com]

Things changed in the 1970s when wealthy businessmen, who had accommodated themselves to the New Deal, became alarmed by declining corporate profits,[2] inflation and the political activism of the 1960s generation.

They began marshaling funds into right-wing think tanks and lobbying groups and, with the support of President Richard M. Nixon, worked to develop a conservative counter-establishment that helped shift the country’s political-economic landscape dramatically rightward.

Right-wing economists associated with the Mont Pelerin Society, including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, were at the heart of the conservative counter-establishment, along with Christian evangelical preachers like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham, who mobilized their legions of followers in support of the right-wing power shift.


[Source: bibliovault.com]

Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom, arguing for deregulation, privatization, and fiscal austerity, was particularly influential in helping to facilitate the displacement of Keynesian thinking and its emphasis on a robust public sector, which predominated during the New Deal era.

Contrary to the depiction of some historians, Richard Nixon was a highly ideological president. He sought to advance a conservative agenda consistent with the worldview of Mont Pelerin Society economists like Friedman who in the 1950s and 1960s was considered “radical right” and part of a “lunatic fringe” to quote Gibbs.[3]

An influential member of the Mont Pelerin Society, George Shultz, a professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Chicago with Friedman who became Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, served in the Nixon administration as Treasury Secretary, Labor Secretary and director of the Office of Management and Budget.[4] Shultz was one of many Mont Pelerin Society alumni appointed to influential positions in the Nixon administration.[5]


Conservative movement stalwarts: Richard Nixon and George Shultz. [Source: dailymail.co.uk]

An important element of Nixon’s agenda, according to Gibbs, was to galvanize corporate interests to fund right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, as counterweights to centrist think tanks like the Ford Foundation, Brookings Institution and Council on Foreign Relations.

Further, Nixon championed millionaire-funded conservative lobby groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which sent brochures to legislators around the country advocating for conservative social and economic policies.

Corporate America’s strategy in this period was showcased in a leaked memo from future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, a Virginia corporate lawyer with close ties to the tobacco industry, calling for a massive influence campaign aimed at Congress, state legislatures and courts and which was to be promoted on television and in the mass media and educational systems. The main goal was to combat liberals, New Left and supporters of consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader who wanted to transform the political-economic system along more socialist lines.[6]


[Source: liberationschool.org]

Powell’s memo inspired a flurry of activity by business lobby groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers, to transform the political culture of the country in a right-wing direction, including by altering school curricula and financing university faculty.

The ideas of Milton Friedman were disseminated through the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the Free to Choose series, which showcased Friedman’s economics in simplified form for the lay viewer in ten episodes which first aired in 1980.[7]


Friedman speaking on Free to Choose episode. [Source: youtube.com]

In addition to influencing the mainstream, there was an effort to build up a distinctly conservative media and to establish media watchdog groups, like Accuracy in Media, that monitored and fought against alleged anti-business press coverage.[8] The watchdog groups pushed mainstream media outlets like The New York Times to adopt a more conservative cast than previously.[9]

A key part of the strategy of “the rich in revolt” was to try to divide the working and middle classes along lines of religion, race and culture. Over time, they pushed identity politics in a way that would prevent an inter-racial movement from developing capable of challenging corporate power.

The Libertarian movement took off in the 1970s with funding from the Koch Brothers, oil billionaires, and other rich donors who aimed to advance a radical free market dogma.

In foreign policy, right-wing businessmen associated with military industries formed lobby groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger, which played up the phony Soviet “threat” and advocated for a major increase in defense spending and an end to Nixon-Kissinger’s détente policies.

They also supported the deregulation of global financial markets and exchange rates and maneuvered to ensure U.S. global dollar supremacy, including by supporting a blood pact with Saudi Arabia by which the Saudis agreed to sell their oil in U.S. dollars in exchange for U.S. weapons and security guarantees.[10]

Neo-conservative intellectuals like Irving Kristol were clever in playing off a growing public consciousness over human rights in the 1970s to advocate for more military interventions to stop human rights abuses, maligning leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky who spotlighted the human rights atrocities of U.S. client regimes and political-economic imperatives underlying them.

While many of the neo-con writers were ideologically driven, others were opportunists who were able to parlay their advocacy for higher military budgets and war into lucrative consulting jobs with military contractors or large corporations that profited from U.S. overseas interventions.[11]

The Committee on the Present Danger’s co-founder, David Packard, was also a co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, which did major computing work for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, and its first co-chairman, Henry H. Fowler, was a partner at the Wall Street investment firm of Goldman Sachs.[12]

Gibbs points out that the New Right’s method of drawing together disparate groups for unified action had no counterpart on the left, which fragmented after the 1960s into single issue groups focused largely on identity politics (race and gender[13]) or environmentalism rather than trying to mobilize the working class.

Collapsing after the end of the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement was anemic in response to the massive military buildup of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the disinformation that accompanied it.

The labor movement had been severely weakened by McCarthy-era purges along with deindustrialization and the shift to a service economy, and many union leaders embraced a militaristic foreign policy.

A sizeable number of leftists at this time were inclined to write off the white proletariat as unreachable and perhaps not worth reaching—a viewpoint advanced by left-wing intellectual gurus like Herbert Marcuse who paved the way for modern-day identity politics.[14]

When Hubert Humphrey and Augustus Hawkins proposed a full employment bill in Congress in 1975, the AFL-CIO opposed it, and women and environmentalist groups offered only minimal support at best, doing nothing to mobilize people to help get it passed.[15]

President Jimmy Carter ended up signing a watered-down version of the bill, which merely encouraged the government to pursue full employment, and the legislation was soon forgotten.[16]


Charles Kirbo and Jimmy Carter. Kirbo remained a close adviser to Carter after he entered the White House. [Source: politico.com]

A key event in Carter’s presidency was the 1979 appointment of a Rockefeller protégé, Paul Volcker, to head the Federal Reserve, a decision Gibbs says was instrumental in fulfilling the conservative goal of redistributing wealth and income toward the privileged classes.

Volcker set extraordinarily high interest rates—characterized by German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt as the “highest since the birth of Jesus Christ”—and pushed for the imposition of austerity measures as part of the attempt to curb inflation, which had been artificially induced. [18]

As a result of the “Volcker Shock,” unemployment expanded to 10.8% and living standards were lowered, with Carter basically guaranteeing his own defeat in the 1980 election.

The grain belt of the Midwest was especially hard hit by the Fed’s policies, which produced waves of farm foreclosures and spikes in rates of mental illness and suicides resulting from harsh economic conditions.[19]


Paul Volcker [Source: vox.com]

The harsh conditions and upward transfer of wealth were made worse by Carter’s deregulation of the airline, banking and trucking industries, the latter of which was transformed into a “sweatshop on wheels.”[20]

Carter’s support for economic austerity measures did not apply to the military as Carter expanded the military budget in his last two years, investing in high-tech weaponry associated with the “Revolution in Military Affairs.”[21]

Further, Carter began arming Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan in an effort to draw the Soviets into “the Afghan trap,” and ramped up the U.S. military presence in the Middle East.

Since the 1980s, the neo-conservative movement has completely taken over the U.S. foreign policy establishment with catastrophic results for all of humanity.

Within the U.S., the revolt of the rich described by Gibbs has helped to revitalize Gilded Age-level social inequalities and destroyed the American Dream for younger generations that are saddled with massive student debt.

Interestingly, Gibbs shows in his book how the rich will precipitate societal crisis—both at home and abroad—including by creating artificial recessions, so that they can introduce draconian policies the public would never otherwise support. We have seen this strategy play out most recently in very dramatic form.

Another disturbing focus of Gibbs’s study is on the acquiescence of wide strata of the population to an economic policy program that has harmed almost everyone. Key is the failure of the political left, which continues to make the same mistakes over and over again and to dither as Rome burns.



1.Gibbs is a professor of history at the University of Arizona who has written previous books on U.S. foreign policy on Congo and the Balkans. ↑



2.Gibbs attributes the declining corporate profits in this period to an artificial rise in oil prices and reduced government spending on transportation infrastructure. David Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), 72. ↑



3.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 48, 50. ↑



4.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 51. ↑



5.Others included John Connally, William Simon, Robert Bork, Herbert Stein and Paul McCracken. ↑



6.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 66. ↑



7.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 69. ↑



8.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 70. ↑



9.Idem. ↑



10.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, ch. 5. ↑



11.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 122. ↑



12.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 128. The original Committee on the Present Danger was founded in 1950 by Paul Nitze and other hawkish cold warrior. It was designed as a “citizen’s lobby” to alert the nation to the Soviet “present danger,” and the resultant need to adopt a huge military buildup. The Committee was reestablished in 1976 with the same underlying goals in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, which had fueled isolationist sentiment. The revitalization of the CPD grew out of an independent group called Team B authorized in 1976 by President Gerald Ford and organized by then-CIA chief, George Bush with the aim of promoting alarmist views about the Soviet “threat.” Neoconservatives later associated with the Project for the New American Century such as Paul Wolfowitz were part of Team B. 33 members received appointments in the Reagan adminstation, including CIA Director Bill Casey. ↑



13.Some elements in the feminist movement embraced working-class issues initially, especially in the push for government-funded childcare; however, the working-class focus of the feminist movement quickly dissipated. ↑



14.Marcuse’s function in distancing the New Left from the white working class is viewed in some circles as a coup for the plutocracy and has led to suspicion that Marcuse, who had worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, was a CIA “asset.” See Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” The Philosophical Salon, June 27, 2022. ↑



15.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 70. ↑



16.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 106. ↑



17.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 169. ↑



18.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 187, 188. ↑



19.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 189. Instead of gravitating to the left which failed to seize the moment, many displaced farmers organized new political groups and militias that advocated white supremacy, anti-Semitism and anti-government violence. ↑



20.Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 180. Additionally, Carter set the groundwork for the “Reagan Revolution” by easing the capital gains tax. ↑



21.See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Improbable Militarist: Jimmy Carter, the Revolution in Military Affairs and Limits of the American Two-Party System,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, 6, 2 (2018). ↑

[blindpig]

The US Retreats While Attempting to Increase Its Grip on its "Backyard"
The New Muscular Monroe Doctrine
Roger Boyd
Mar 13, 2025

Why is the US bullying Panama, Canada and Mexico so outrageously? It’s an attempt by the new administration to reinstate its dominance over the American Hemisphere; ousting Chinese influence under a reinforced Monroe Doctrine (the statement of US dominance in the hemisphere in the 1800s). As it retreats from Europe and cuts other parts of its global dominance complex, while refocusing its efforts on China, it must make sure that its backyard is secure. As I have reported elsewhere, two and a half decades of debt-funded war making, oligarch bailouts, and tax cuts for the rich have placed the US government into a fiscal straight-jacket. At the same time, the oligarch extractive neoliberalism has socio-economically weakened the homeland by immiserating much of the US population and destroying much of the productive capacity of the nation. The answer is a retrenchment internationally, with Europe given a much bigger responsibility for managing its hemisphere to allow the concentration of US forces against China. At home, a move away from the inverted totalitarianism that has produced a political somnolence among the general population to a more overt fascistic orientation utilizing Christian Nationalism and Zionism to motivate the population to a greater readiness for war.

The most important nations are the neighbours of the US, Canada and Mexico. That is why Trump has focused his tariff threats and aggressive statements towards them early on; the Boss wanting to cow his vassals even more while forcing a chunk of their productive forces to move to the US. As noted by this article:

Second, and more importantly, Trump is trying to impose a Monroe Doctrine redux, where he can bully Mexico and, by extension, the rest of Latin America, into compliance with his new era of gunboat diplomacy without fear of retaliation.

These are dangerous times for Mexico and Latin America. The signs of a strategic and military buildup are clear: the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America”, the labelling of eight Mexican cartels as terrorist organisations, the stepping up of CIA secret drone missions deep inside Mexican territory, the deployment of a Stryker Brigade combat team to the border, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s declaration that “all options are on the table”.

The deployment of troops and the escalating rhetoric are creating the conditions for a US military incursion into Mexico. If one does take place, it would fit neatly into the long history of US aggression against its southern neighbour and Latin America as a whole, which began 200 years ago with the so-called Monroe Doctrine.

In 1823, then-President James Monroe put forward a policy, which under the guise of opposing European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere, sought to solidify US supremacy over the region.

With respect to Canada, China sees what is happening and has decided to intensify the economic pressure upon a nation that placed 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs and kidnapped the CFO of Huawei on the orders of Trump’s previous administration. Why help Canada when its’ ruling class has been such an obedient tool of the US Empire? Better to weaken it even more unless it embraces relations with China.



Next in importance is Central America, with the Hong Kong owners of the Panamanian ports already being forced to sell out to the US oligarchy (Blackrock). We can expect a more aggressive approach toward Cuba and Nicaragua. Also high on the list is a Venezuela that has suffered under US aggression for more than two decades. At last subjugating that nation will send a very chilling message to the rest of Latin America. Already, Trump is turning the screw by cancelling the permission of Chevron to produce oil in Venezuela while considering ordering more US companies to cease their operations there.

Milei of Argentina is of course more than happy to become a fully compliant and kowtowing US vassal, but even then his nation was not exempted from the US tariffs on imported steel; the need for the US to steal the productive forces of its vassals cannot be offset by any level of subservience. We can expect aggressive moves against such things as the Chinese port that just opened in Peru. The problem is that it makes economic sense for Latin America to trade more with the nation that has the greatest productive forces and appetite for the continent’s natural resource exports; greater than the de-industrialized US. Especially when China funds the building of infrastructure compared to the US bullying and attempts to steal what remains of Latin America’s productive assets; with US investors only wanting easy outsized profits.



The independent and more socialist Bolivia will experience even greater attempts at regime change. But the pressure from the US will be somewhat independent of the political stripes of the national ruling coalitions, as it is aimed at subjugation, obedience and openness to US extractive profiteering and theft of productive assets. Brazil, with easily the largest population and economy in Latin America, will come under extensive pressure to reduce its deepening economic cooperation with China. The reality is, all that the US has to offer is blackmail through its ability to use its currency as a weapon (which risks destroying the US$ reserve currency status), tariffs and internal political interference and military threats. The best way to tell if a nation is truly resisting US pressure will be if we see such things as US NGOs and media organizations being restricted, US embassies forcibly downsized, and entry restrictions on US operatives.

The oligarchs of Latin America are now faced with a very hard choice: accept increased US domination and economic stagnation or fight their previous Boss and ask for help from a new, perhaps nicer, Boss. They will of course try mightily to find a middle way but that will be increasingly closed by a US that becomes more and more desperate to protect its “backyard” as its inability to hold back the rise of China becomes too brutally obvious to remain blind to.

If “personnel is policy” then Trump has made his policies towards Latin America very evident by making “Little Narco” Rubio, a product of the reactionary Latino oligarch retreat Miami, the Secretary of State. This is him 7 years ago calling for a greater US focus on the “Western” Hemisphere.



Here he is a month ago bullying Central American nations to bow to US power and reduce their dalliances with China.



At his Senate hearing he pushed the “China bad” message hard, after quickly forgetting his previous full on support for the Ukraine War.



And just like the fake warrior Hegseth, he pushes his Christian (Catholic) bona fides very publicly. All the better to push the fear mongering of “godless communists”. Laughably, he pushes the Uighur Moslem genocide lies while forgetting the murder of millions of Moslems by the US and the ongoing Zionist genocide of the majority-Moslem Palestinians. Rubio started lying at an early stage of his political career, claiming his family fled Castro when they actually fled the dictator Batista and claiming that he saw nothing while living at his brother’s house that was a centre of Miami cocaine dealing. Here he is wearing the Ash Wednesday “Ash of Crosses”, looking more like a Bond villain than one who truly follows the teachings of Christ, while doing nothing about the mass murders of Christian Alawites in Syria by the HTS government that the West supports.


He is the perfect individual to drive the super-charged US policy of aggression against any nation in the Americas that dares not to say “uncle”.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/the-us ... attempting

[blindpig]

American Fascism, Expanding Seas, Mass Disability
Nate Bear
Mar 14, 2025



The US immigration agency ICE has detained two Germans, a Brit and a Canadian tourist in recent weeks as America’s illegals panic ratches up a notch. The weeks-long detentions, which appear to be based on sketchy intel about incomplete/incorrect visas, are being seen by many as a further example of creeping fascism under Trump. ICE have also indefinitely detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University for the crime of organising pro-Palestine rallies. Khalil is a legal US resident on a green card, theoretically protected by the US constitution, yet so far this has offered him no protection. All this has been fairly well covered this week.

What has been less well covered is the fact that America’s sprawling network of ICE detention centres (more than 200 nationwide, all for-profit) and its squadrons of jackbooted enforcers (around 50,000 agents) were very deliberately created and utilised by moderate, liberal presidents. Presidents who, we’re told, unlike Trump ‘respected the constitution’ and ‘believed in democracy.’ ICE is barely twenty years old, established under Bush Jr and fully legitimised under Obama. Obama, who had eight years to dismantle ICE (which at the time was a fledgling agency), but instead demanded more funding for it every year, massively expanding its reach and enthusiastically embracing its powers.

Alongside his embrace of ICE, Obama also ramped-up a little-known homeland security programme, named, with an Orwellian flourish, “Secure Communities.” Explicitly designed to create hostility within communities against undocumented migrants, it gave local police new immigration enforcement powers. This initiative to hunt down people without the correct papers existed in only 14 counties under Bush Jr, but by 2013, it was active in all 3,181 US jurisdictions. As a result, Obama oversaw record deportations, exceeding all the Republican presidents that had come before him, a record not even Trump one could match.

Obama created the deportation machine for Trump’s American fascism.

I don’t think any of us would be surprised to see Trump using ICE and local police forces to detain more dissidents and further advance American fascism in the coming years. When this happens, it will also in no small part be down to Obama, who militarised America’s police departments under the so-called 1033 program. Established by Bill Clinton, the programme allowed the Pentagon to transfer excess military equipment to local police departments. Modest transfers through the late 90s and Bush Jr accelerated massively under Obama, especially after his donors got freaked out by the occupy Wall Street protests and encampments. By 2016, Obama was sending nearly a quarter of a billion dollars worth of battlefield weapons to local police departments, a massive 2400% increase on Bush Jr’s final year.

American liberals need to start reckoning with the complicity of rainbow flag identity politicians like Obama in laying the groundwork for Trump. If they start to do that, if they work to understand how liberal rule has always created the architecture for fascism and why it must be rejected for any hope of a decent future, we might all get somewhere eventually. But without that understanding, America is doomed to a death spiral that could just take the world down with it.

Fuck AI more

I have already explained how much I hate AI. A few developments this week have ratcheted up my hate to new levels. Firstly Sam Altman, the boss of ChatGPT, announced the company had begun testing a creative writing AI. He gave an example of the output, which he praised. It’s total dogshit, the sort of writing that spills forth from your brain when you’re half cut after a day of lazy drinking and the mysteries of life suddenly reveal themselves to you. That’s not to say it won’t be used (and abused) by capitalists. We’re almost certain to see AI-generated movies, TV show scripts and book series. Cutting creative humans out of the creative process for certain types of content is inevitable. The average Michael Bay or superhero movie may as well be written by AI as it is. So does it matter? I think it does. I think it cuts to the core of what it means to be human. Ever since our long years in the caves we’ve been entertained by the words and images created by fellow humans. There is an inherent soul-nourishing mystery about being entertained by another human doing something you can’t do, using only their brain. And in that process of creation, they do something to you. When this is replaced by machines, what mystery remains? It will further the impoverishment of the human experience on Earth. What will become of our ability to create and how we relate to each other?

On this, AI is already shredding trust and the relationship between teachers and students. This week a computer science professor at Berkeley tweeted that they suspect the large bulk of their students are using Chat GPT to complete assignments.



We’re moving rapidly towards a world where people can’t think for themselves. Where the temptation to plug an inquiry into AI rather than do the thinking and research yourself will soon be overwhelming. What will this do to our cognitive abilities? What will it do to brains congested with plastic when we don’t need to, and don’t want to, think.

Also in AI news this week, Yale University suspended a professor after an AI-generated news site accused her of terrorism. If you read the story, the only accusations are that she participated in pro-Palestine rallies and spoke out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The AI ‘news’ website called Jewish Onliner appears to trawl the internet for pro-Palestine voices and accuse them of terrorism, expressly to harm their lives and careers. Job done, in the case of Dr Helyeh Doutaghi. The Zionist lobby allied with malicious AI as just another tool in the Nazi toolkit, and a reminder of how Palestine is a key fracture line along which everything is breaking.

In the final piece of AI news for the week, British prime minister Keir Starmer said he is going to replace every civil servant with an AI, where feasible. This is the same Keir Starmer who has just declared war on the rising numbers of sick and disabled by announcing plans to slash their benefit payments to try and force them into work. You’d have to be wilfully ignorant not to see where this is going. A refined austerity state powered by punitive AI will, by design, accelerate the immiseration and impoverishment of large parts of the British population. The challenge for Brits is the same as for Americans: to be radicalised against neoliberalism, turn away from neonationalism and embrace a radical politics of justice that can pull us back from the brink.

The Long Covid backlash

The failure of the left on covid has left it unable to connect the attack on disabled people by the neoliberal state with the reality that this is happening in the context of long covid. The most recent NHS survey of long covid rates in the population found nearly 5% of people are suffering with the condition, roughly 3.1 million people. Rates of long covid in British children nearly doubled in a year to March 2024, with more than 110,000 children in England & Scotland now suffering. In the US, somewhere around 7% of the population has long covid, according to the CDC. Rates of disability have skyrocketed since 2020, the covid connection clear and blindingly obvious.



But no one talks about it, especially not politicians. That’s because the neoliberal state is practised in punishment, not care. It demands bodies for capital and for nothing else. This kind of mass disabling event was always going to be treated accordingly, and as we are seeing: nothing other than a threat to capital. Hence Starmer going to war with the disabled and the Republicans pushing massive cuts to welfare.

For neoliberal states looking to hunt down dissidents and the disabled, AI is a godsend. It will enable the middle managers of new fascism to scour every single digital corner for signs of treachery and dissent, for signs of the activity that will prove you aren’t sick or needy. And all the while the massive amounts of energy required for this will ensure it burns up the planet.

Heating up

In planet burning news, sea level rise hit unexpected highs last year according to NASA, at nearly a quarter of an inch. The expected rise was 0.17 inches. This was not because of melting ice but because of thermal expansion - when water heats up it expands. The oceans are absorbing so much heat they are being forced upwards. It’s quite incredible. In response to this dire state of affairs France has just announced it is planning for a temperature rise of 4 degrees Celsius within 75 years. So within the lifetime of the average person born today (all being equal), France expects summers will regularly be too hot to spend much time outside without quite literally dying and crop failures will be essentially continuous. News of France anticipating a near-term apocalypse passed by with less than a flicker of interest in the mainstream.

Things are bad, we need to do something, but loads of people don’t know it’s this bad, many don’t care, and the ones that do know don’t know what to do. Something I’ll be writing about soon. In the meantime every little heart I get on my articles is a shot of heat to my soul, reassurance that there remain people with a consistent moral through-line. So thanks for the click.

Have a good weekend all.

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/american- ... -seas-mass

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National Security Archive – CIA Covert Ops: Kennedy Assassination Records Lift Veil of Secrecy
March 19, 2025
National Security Archive, 3/19/25

Washington D.C., March 19, 2025 – On the day of President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, “47 percent of the political officers serving in United States embassies were CAS”—intelligence agents working under diplomatic cover known as Controlled American Sources, White House aide, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in a Top Secret memorandum on “CIA Reorganization.” In the U.S. Embassy in Paris, 123 “diplomats” were actually CIA undercover agents; in Chile, 11 of the 13 Embassy “political officers” were CIA undercover operatives. “CIA today has nearly as many people under official cover overseas as [the] State [Department]—3900 to 3700,” Schlesinger reported to President Kennedy. “About 1500 of those are under State Department cover (the other 2200 are presumably under military or other non-State official cover).” (Document 1)

The memorandum, declassified in full for the first time yesterday, is part of a final release of records on the Kennedy assassination under the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. Pursuant to a directive from President Trump on January 23, the National Archives released 2,182 records (63,400 pages) in two tranches on the evening of March 18 and noted that more would be released as they were digitalized.

The new release includes hundreds of CIA records as well as White House and NSC documents relating to covert operations abroad, particularly in Latin American nations such as Cuba and Mexico which are fixtures in the history of the Kennedy assassination. Most of them were released before but with key redactions to protect intelligence sources and methods and covert operations abroad from being revealed. For the first time, these records on CIA covert operations are being released uncensored.

Among the revelations are completely unredacted copies of:

A key document from the CIA’s famed “Family Jewels” series describing “examples of activities exceeding the CIA’s charter,” including a CIA counterespionage operation against the French embassy in Washington, D.C., that included “breaking and entering and the removal of documents from the French consulate” and DCI John McCone’s dealings with the Vatican, including Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, which “could and would raise eyebrows in some quarters.” (Document 4)
The CIA Inspector General’s report on the 1961 assassination of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, revealing the names of CIA officers and others who assisted in the plot. (Document 6)
A series of summaries of briefings by DCI John McCone to members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) that provide more details about known CIA political action programs and previously unknown details about “the Agency’s covert financial support to political parties in the fight against communism” around the world. (Document 2)
A CIA inspector general report on the workings of the CIA station in Mexico City providing one of the most detailed views of how the CIA organizes its operations on the ground. (Document 3)
A history of CIA operations in the Western Hemisphere covering 1946-1965, including expenditures by CIA stations in Latin America, and details on CIA payments and influence operations in Bolivia to orchestrate the election of their chosen candidate General René Barrientos. (Document 5)

“There is no doubt that the JFK Records Act has advanced public knowledge of CIA covert operations – who they targeted, how they were conducted and who conducted them – more than any other declassification in the history of access to information,” said National Security Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh, who has studied CIA operations for decades. “Without this law and its implementation over the last 27 years, these operational CIA files would likely have stayed Top Secret for eternity.”


Comparison of page from 1964 CIA history of Mexico City station

The JFK Records Act
Congress passed the 1992 JFK Act in the wake of a public uproar over Oliver Stone’s popular conspiratorial movie, JFK. The film, starring Kevin Costner as New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison, who mounted a failed, conspiracy-driven prosecution of a local businessman for killing Kennedy, finished with a statement that over five million pages of records on the assassination remained secret. “The suspicions created by government secrecy eroded confidence in the truthfulness of federal agencies in general and damaged their credibility,” noted the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in its final report. “Finally, frustrated by the lack of access and disturbed by the conclusions of Oliver Stone’s JFK, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act), mandating the gathering and opening of all records concerned with the death of the President.”

After the JFK Act was passed, the National Security Archive played a role in advising the five-member oversight board and its staff to establish a broad definition of an “assassination-related” document. The ARRB mandated the full release of thousands of documents related not only to the immediate crime, but on covert action and espionage operations in Cuba, and Mexico, among other countries, and on FBI operations and the mafia. To date, the documents have produced countless revelations of the CIA and FBI’s operational histories.


CIA expenditures in Latin America by country for FY 1961. (See Doc 5)

“The Review Board has worked hard to obtain all records relating to the assassination of President Kennedy and to release the records to the fullest extent possible to the American people,” the Assassination Records Review Board members wrote in a letter to President Clinton in September 1998, when they turned in their final report. “We have done so in the hope that release of these records will shed new evidentiary light on the assassination of President Kennedy, enrich the historical understanding of that tragic moment in American history, and help restore public confidence in the government’s handling of the assassination and its aftermath.”

The National Security Archive is just starting to sort through this treasure trove of new revelations. Watch this space for future postings on CIA operations and much more.

To read the documents click here. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book ... 15d76322c4

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/03/nat ... f-secrecy/

[blindpig]

How the Roman and American Empires are the same
Indrajit Samarajiva

March 21, 2025 , 3:56 pm .


The wool changes, but the wolf remains the same (Photo: The American Interest)

The US claims its imperialism isn't imperialism ( it just helps by bombing your people, oh boy ), but it is remarkably similar to the Roman Empire. It's literally the same architecture. Historian Mary Beard ( et al ) said something in passing that reflects how I've been trying to define the White Empire for years. She said:

"Military conquest and the imposition of foreign control (whether in the form of taxation, puppet rule, or military occupation) inevitably impact cultural life, both in the imperial center and in the provincial territories. No one can remain culturally unaffected by imperialism."

I'll focus on the first part of this statement, the methods of control, which remain the basic operating system of imperial power. Today, the United States practices all of these forms: financial, political, military, and cultural imperialism.

Financial
President Donald Trump openly refers to tariffs as a tax on foreigners, which they really aren't, but he expresses his country's identity as always. The United States (meaning the companies that actually run the country) taxes the world, but it does so through debt. The real tax is dollar debt service, which devours most of the budgets of many countries (like mine) and can never truly be paid (it accumulates endlessly, and if that doesn't work, it just hits you). The United States accuses China of setting debt traps, but remember, every accusation is a confession.

As a recent study of more than 1,000 Chinese loans to Africa found : "We found no 'asset seizures,' and despite contractual clauses requiring arbitration, there is no evidence of the use of courts to enforce payments, nor of the application of penalty interest rates." The US does all of these things through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, always run by an American and a European, because of imperialism. The wool changes, but the wolf remains the same.

It's important to understand that debt and slavery were synonymous for most of history (read Michael Hudson's book, And Forgive Them Their Debts ). If one was in debt, one would give one's wives, children, or oneself into slavery. Today we condemn it, but look at the people who work as slaves. The names change, but the methods remain the same. In fact, today, Sri Lankan wives work as maids in the Middle East, and very often as slaves as well. Today, convoys of people march toward the hostile United States to work far from their rights and their families. Slaves then, illegal immigrants today—one and the same. National debt and personal wage slavery are nothing more than the slavery of our time—just ask Tolstoy ( The Slavery of Our Time ).

The United States keeps countries in chaos so slaves can run riot and to extract cheap tributes in relation to natural resources. The places with the most gold, cobalt, and other resources tend to be the most indebted, because they are the most enslaved. Remember, the United States is still a colony, and mass migration is nothing more than colonization . Even the reaction of the last wave of colonizers is the same (and look at my Sri Lankan relatives today, complaining about immigrants).

Tim Cornell (in his book The Roman World ) says: "Peasant families were forced out in large numbers by wealthy investors and replaced on the land by slave labor. Slaves were plentiful thanks to military victories and the subsequent mass enslavement of defeated populations." This remains at the heart of the debate about "illegal immigrants," precisely that term being the correct and modern word for a class of exploitable and expendable labor, i.e., slaves.

Today, the United States destabilizes the rest of the world so that slaves can enter the country alone, or uses outsourcing to leverage the same remote labor force. It's the same sound of financial suction that characterizes the empire, only with more sophisticated financial instruments. As the latter-day Roman Antonio Soprano said : "This is a pyramid scheme, from time immemorial. Shit runs downhill, money runs up. It's that simple."

Political
The United States has long been setting up "democratic" puppets and dismantling the whole spectacle when things don't go their way. Anyone witnessing Zelensky twisting in the wind can see the exposed hand of the American puppet, shaking the whole world. When Henry Kissinger said "it is dangerous to be an enemy of the United States but fatal to be a friend of the United States," he was describing what people might think if two South Vietnamese puppets fell, but that shit happened, again and again. It's been 60 years of rehashes and reboots, extolling some despot as the second coming of democracy and then crucifying him.

If anyone thinks the US has friends and no interests at this point, they have no idea. The US installs puppet governments everywhere, letting them dance just enough to be entertaining, but pulling the curtain on them if they ever become independent, or simply when there's no more blood money to squeeze. In addition to the complete destruction of Ukraine, the Hegemon helped stage coups in Peru and Pakistan, and places like Egypt and Jordan have been doing this for a long time. Hell, even Australia suffered a coup in the 1970s, and has been reliably suicidal and genocidal ever since.

As a reanimated corpse of liberalism, Joe Biden was a loyal puppeteer, talking about "shared values" (genocide, torture, and theft, mainly), but under Trump, the ventriloquist doesn't even try to still his lips. The president just made Jordan's eunuch sit and eat shit while his face contorts and made Zelensky sit while he mocked him for not wearing a suit. He also made the Polish imbecile Duda wait an hour before firing him in 10 minutes and disrespected the leaders of the UK, France, etc., letting them know they are just puppets on longer strings. Shared arrogance has been replaced by humiliation. The puppeteer doesn't even try anymore and petulantly throws away his toys.

But I digress. The point is that the Empire, whether Roman or American, proceeds in the same way. Overt political control is ungainly and unnecessary when you can find local puppets willing to grovel, kill your enemies, and give away their own population and resources.

Military occupation
Military occupation is obvious: the United States has some 800 military bases around the world. If you showed this to someone from the ancient world, they would say, "What a nice empire you have there." Only short-sighted moderns deny this, as if squashing bugs on a rug and calling it massage therapy. In World War II, the United States militarily occupied the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, etc., and it's still there . It never withdrew after the war, because it never stopped for people of color, and even delusional Europe is still occupied. No country is independent when it has foreign troops on its soil, and these aren't real countries.

I call it a White Empire because, for those at the bottom, what's the difference? In places like Sri Lanka, we've only seen white people like the Dutch, the British, and now the Americans exploiting us under different flags, but always doing the same thing. Today, brown people like me can become white and participate in our own colonization—yay! Like the diversification of the Roman Empire, we'll do the dirty work just in time for them to leave us with the steaming pile of dog shit that is the late empire (DEI [an acronym that stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] did it!).

Yet America's current collapse is rewriting its triumphant post-World War II history . The fact, increasingly evident, is that the United States did not win World War II and has not really won any wars. In fact, they were rendered impotent after Vietnam, unable to recruit a massive army since. Now they cannot even field a professional (debt-enslaved) army without knowing they would be annihilated within weeks, so they increasingly rely on conscript colonies like Israel, Ukraine, and South Korea. This is just another form of military occupation, nations so occupied that they sacrifice generations of their own children to fight their own neighbors. Each "conflict" may be covered up by local ideology and current events, but why do Slavs fight Slavs, Semites genocide real Semites, and Koreans turn their guns on Koreans? Divide and conquer is as old as the unified empire, and it still works like a charm. Conquer by using the conquered—the same hellish recipe. The only American innovation has been the discovery that more money is made by losing wars than by winning them, but it's the same old imperialism.

Conclusion
I'm skimming over these points because, for people alive today, they don't need to be said. Biden did it, and Trump comes out and says it. Biden just committed genocide in Palestine and military-industrial bombing in Ukraine, and Trump continues the same policies with less hypocrisy. They are the good cop and bad cop of the same police state. The US is a two-headed monster, but both consume lives and resources and screw up American coffers. The financial instruments may change, but the tune remains the same. As Mary Beard said, the definition of imperialism is "military conquest and imposition of foreign control (whether in the form of taxation, puppet government, or military occupation)." And so it remains.

The only difference is our indifference. While the Roman Empire demanded loyalty, Americans laugh at the idea that they are an empire. They have discovered that the best place to hide an imperial elephant is in plain sight, covered in newspapers. The American empire relies on sleights of hand like debt, democracy ™, and “defense” to achieve even greater imperialism, largely by changing the names. As Keyzer Soze said, the devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world he didn’t exist. But the American empire does exist . We can watch it cease to exist, like a song that can only be heard as it fades away.

Indrajit Samarajiva, a Sri Lankan native raised in Ohio and trained in Cognitive Science at McGill University, has been blogging for nearly 25 years. As an adult, he returned to Sri Lanka, where he founded magazines, worked in content and website development, and was an online editor. His writing focuses on collapse, climate change, the "White Empire" (his term for the American empire), philosophy, and politics.

This article was originally written in English and published on the Indi.ca blog on March 14, 2025, and translated for Misión Verdad by Spoiler.

https://misionverdad.com/traducciones/c ... n-lo-mismo

(There are many more similarities but when you sum them imperialism is the result. Something about class...)

Google Translator

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The Institutions Are Collapsing
Nate Bear
Mar 21, 2025



The institutions are collapsing and the people are sick.

Ninety percent of people I know, from those in their 20s to those in their 70s, have, at some point in the last few months, been sick.

The flu has done a number on some, unknown viruses on others, there’s been strep throat, there’s been covid, there’s been ‘anxiety attacks’ that presented, in one friend, like a heart attack (she’s 39).

Just yesterday my partner told me one of her best friends (she’s 40) had to rush to urgent care with what the doctors ‘reckoned was the flu.’ Because she presented with pneumonia symptoms they sent her home with antibiotics. Whether it was actually a secondary bacterial infection as a result of the flu, who knows! Kind of looked like it, ‘they reckoned.’

This is what passes for medical care these days.

Medical institutions are collapsing.

Public health has collapsed.

The people are sick because everyone has had covid on multiple occasions by now. And covid has trashed immune systems. Specifically, it supresses for months, sometimes even years, the T-cells that help us fight infections. This is no longer particularly controversial. Immunologists who argued about this at first are beginning to agree that yeah, something has changed. According to one group of immunologists, covid represents ‘a new disease paradigm’ that will plague our societies for decades.

And it’s not just me coming with anecdotes about sick friends and family. It’s clear in every chart, in every graph. Whooping cough. Norovirus. Pneumonia. Sickness absence from schools. Long-term disability. All the numbers are up, up, up.

This isn’t a matter of opinion. This is a matter of fact.

But most people don’t know about this because they haven’t been told. People don’t know because our media and political institutions told us covid had morphed into ‘just a cold’ to return us to capitalist normality. ‘You do you’ neoliberal individualism was transposed into public health to ensure the resumption of capitalist business-as-usual, as I explained here.

But covid isn’t a cold (even if it can present as such) as I have written about before. It has different mechanisms of infection to the flu or common cold-causing rhinoviruses. It can do more damage to all bodily systems, including our immune systems, than rhinoviruses and flu viruses.

And, five years on, the damage it has done to immune systems is becoming evident. Viruses are hitting people more often and they are hitting them harder.

People think it’s 2019. They think they can’t have covid in 2025 because “I’ve already had it/I’ve had the vaccine.” They believe the propaganda. They still believe in old archetypes about the responsibility of the state to the citizen. They think the state protected them with vaccines and that this protection meant they could go back to normal.

But normal is over, gone, dead.

And it’s never coming back.

Most of us have known a broad stability.

Call it privilege, call it the luxury of ignorance, but, for the most part, background systems until recently largely functioned to maintain dependability, humming away, providing the foundation upon which lives are built.

That era is coming to a swift end.

For many people, privilege is still preventing them from seeing how our world is shifting.

Public health is a frontline marker of this institutional breakdown, signalling the collapse of the grand bargain between the leaders and the led.

But it’s not just public health. The rot is embedded in all our primary institutions. From the legal, to the political, from academic institutions to media institutions.

And it’s not just in the US, where Trump is speed running the end of stability. It’s across the west.

The assault on international law is one of the most obvious cases of institutional collapse. The genocide of Gaza has rendered international law, such as it was, null and void. This collapse has been engineered. It is a deliberate dismantling.

Legal rulings that compel states to detain individuals issued with international arrest warrants, like Netanyahu, have been ignored by the US and other western countries. Legal judgements labelling Israel’s unceasing violence as a genocide have been ignored. Legal scholars have repeatedly stated that a generational evil is underway in Gaza, yet the weapons keep flowing. And the state conducting this genocide has attacked and sanctioned the lawyers attempting to uphold the law, all to a great wave of western silence.

The mask of respectability has been peeled back and our governments have shown their lawless, ultra violent faces.

If massive regional or global war breaks out between countries in the coming years, as looks increasingly likely, we can trace this directly back to Gaza and western support for systematic mass slaughter. Mass slaughter that stomped on the notion of human rights. That imploded the distinction between combatant and civilian. That demolished all of our claims to moral superiority over the bad guys. That collapsed the framework of international law.

This demolition of human rights law hasn’t just been confined to foreign policy. Countries like the US and the UK are bringing this repressive, rights-stomping architecture home.

In recent months British journalists have been detained and had their homes raided for no other reason than condemning Israel and writing in support of Palestine. In the US, the repression of pro-Palestine voices that began under Biden has been forcefully ramped up under Trump, with the shameful illegal detention and attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil the most outrageous example.

This repression won’t stop with non-American citizens. It is bound to come for American citizens in short order.

This repression isn’t just a product of Trump or Biden or Starmer. It isn’t just a product of the state. It is also coming from academic institutions, as servile university leaders cave to the Zionist agenda. Across America, universities have attempted to repress protests against genocide, have called in the police against students, have allowed snipers to be positioned on university grounds against young people. University leaders have allowed their students to be shot and attacked with chemical weapons. Professors, including Jewish professors (in case anyone still thinks any of this is about anti-semitism) have been fired for sharing social media posts in support of Palestine. Medical doctors have been suspended for speaking out against Israel. Universities, led by Columbia, are now expelling students and revoking degrees for the crime of standing against genocide.

This is all institutional collapse.

Professor Katherine Franke who was forced out of Columbia in January gave a good insight recently into the ingredients that have led to this collapse. She told Chris Hedges:

“The boards of trustees at elite universities,” she said, “are no longer made up of people who are involved in education or committed to the educational mission. Instead they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and arms manufacturers who see their responsibility is to protect only the endowment fund. Columbia is the largest residential landlord in New York City. I describe the university as a real estate holding operation with a side hustle in classes. They are no longer interested in the role (universities) should play in a democracy.”

Franke says Columbia will never been the same again after Gaza, if it even survives at all.

And the media outlets people rely on for accurate information to understand the world have, when it comes to Gaza, twisted the information flows to suit the agenda of Israel and the west.

They have consistently attempted to both sides ‘the conflict,’ as they call it. At every turn they have manufactured consent for genocide with a variety of rhetorical slights-of-hand. From justifying every mass slaughter by parroting Israeli propaganda about ‘targeting terrorists’, to casting doubt on the death numbers by inserting ‘Hamas-run’ before every mention of the murder toll, to explicitly arguing for ethnic cleansing. To avoid saying the word genocide The Guardian this week called Israel’s renewed campaign of mass murder “a war of extraordinary civilian casualties.” This is cowardice and complicity.

Unable to present any balance whatsoever over Gaza, unable to alert people to the reality of forever covid, the media, too, must be seen as undergoing institutional collapse.

Collapse is an overused word. Generally, and by me, in this article.

The word itself invokes a sudden ceasing to exist. But in the context of institutions, it doesn’t mean that. It means the way they operated previously, and which we took for granted as being generally in service to the people we expect them to be in service to, is over.

We expect the media to be in service to the truth. We expect universities to be in service to education and their students. We expect public health to be in service to health. We expect politicians to be in service to the public. We expect that the law will be applied against bad guys.

This is over. And this is collapse.

But because these institutions still exist, because they remain embedded in our societies, we often can’t see this collapse for what it is. And many people, without access to alternative and critical points of view, are labouring under the false assumption that these institutions continue to be in service to the groups they expect them to service. But they’re not. They’re rotten, decaying husks of their previous, earlier selves. By no means have these institutions ever been perfect, but by now they have been thoroughly corrupted by power, by neoliberal capitalism, and by lobby interests.

But the nature of decay means that you can’t hide it forever. And as these institutions continue to serve interests and agendas other than their stated ones, people will begin to notice. People are already noticing.

Support for Israel is plummeting. Increasingly few people trust mainstream news sources. Trust in politicians is at an all-time low. Trust in public health leaders has slumped.

And as people begin to wonder who and what they can trust, they are finding alternatives. Because, like an acid dripping through the core of society, the corruption of liberal institutions, the turning away from their central missions, has created fissures all across society. And these fissures are being filled by far-right political and media figures, from Trump to Andrew Tate to Jordan Peterson to Tommy Robinson.

The job of pro-social people, then, as the collapse of institutions opens up these fissures, fuelling fascism and breakdown, is to spot the gaps and provide inclusive alternatives that can help build an anti-fascist future.

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-insti ... collapsing

[blindpig]

Make History—Don’t Repeat It!

US history repeats itself constantly. But it doesn’t have to.
The Revolution Continues
Apr 01, 2025

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. --H.L. Mencken


Make History—Don’t Repeat It!
by C.A. Matthews

I have to stifle my giggles whenever an acquaintance goes on about how “Trump is the worse president ever! He’s supporting a genocide in Gaza! He’s taking away our freedom of speech! He’s trying to steal Greenland! No other president has ever done such horrible things!”

(Yes, I know that Biden also supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza among other horrendous things, but to these poor dears, Joe Biden is a kindly old man who likes licking ice cream cones and playing with little girls’ hair. He’s some sort of saint apparently in Dem circles. No kidding.)

The reason I want to giggle—actually I want to laugh out loud in their faces—is because it’s just too obvious how well our government’s propaganda works. These people are clueless! Any US history classes they may have taken in high school or college were woefully inadequate. Their instructors obviously never went into depth on certain topics, and the textbooks used in those classes didn’t waste much print on those topics, either.

It’s as if American powers-that-be don’t want to air our dirty laundry to the working masses. If American workers really learned about their country’s actual history, they might get ideas. Bad ideas. Ideas and examples of how Americans stood up against oppression, intolerance, bigotry, and outright theft of land, labor, and resources in the past.

In A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn doesn’t beat around the bush. He tells things straightforwardly, without the narrative spin that always seems to make the wealthy, white, occasionally slave-owning male elites the heroes in your average US history book. From now on, whenever somebody says a silly thing like Trump is the “only president to support a genocide,” I will point them to Zinn’s classic tome.

Here’s what Zinn has to say in the seventh chapter of A People’s History about one particular incident of genocide that was not only supported by the United States government, it was actually committed by the US government against several groups of indigenous people:

[President Andrew] Jackson’s 1829 message to Congress made his position clear: “I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those states.” Congress moved quickly to pass a removal bill…

In late 1831, thirteen thousand Choctaws began the long journey west to a land and climate totally different from what they knew. “Marshaled by guards, hustled by agents, harried by contractors, they were being herded on the way to an unknown and unwelcome destination like a flock of sick sheep.”… Everything was disorganized. Food disappeared. Hunger came. (…) People began to die of pneumonia. In the summer, a major cholera epidemic hit… Choctaws died by the hundreds. (…)

Cherokees...faced a set of laws passed by Georgia: their lands were taken, their government abolished, all meetings prohibited. Cherokees advising others not to migrate were to be imprisoned. Cherokees could not testify in court against any white. Cherokees could not dig for gold recently discovered on their land. (...)

[In 1838 President] Martin Van Buren ordered Major General Winfield Scott into Cherokee territory to use whatever military force was required to move the Cherokees west. Five regiments of regulars and four thousand militia and volunteers began pouring into Cherokee country. (…) [A] leading authority on Indian removal estimates that during confinement in the stockade or on the march westward four thousands Cherokees died.

...Van Buren spoke to Congress:

“It affords sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects.”



You read that right—The Cherokee were living on top of a gold mine, literally. Congress eagerly cooperated with the removal of the tribes, and it had the “happiest effects” for the very wealthy white men who grabbed those lands after the natives had been forcibly removed. So, the current sitting Congress isn’t the only one to approve of such a horrible injustice against an indigenous people by voting for more money and arms to be given in the cause of their “removal” or genocide. Trump and Biden were not the first presidents to condone such immoral activities. Jackson and Van Buren beat them to it.

What is really sad is that the Cherokee by the 1830s had integrated themselves quite well into white society, living on farms, becoming tradesmen, learning to read and write in both their own language and in English. Some wealthy Cherokee were even slave owners. But none of their cooperation with the white man came to any good when it came to Presidents Jackson and Van Buren and Congress grabbing the gold and their lands for greedy white slave-owning plantation owners. What few rights the Cherokees thought they possessed evaporated. The Cherokee were marched off their lands along what became known as The Trail of Tears. Thousands died along the way.

The “removal” (via military force) of the Choctaw, the Chickasaws, the Cherokee, the Creeks, and the Seminole from their homelands in the Southeastern US to less fertile lands west of the Mississippi River was genocide plain and simple. It was ordered by the president and executed by the US government via its army and private contractors/land agents. As President Van Buren said to Congress, they were “happy” to have done such a horrible deed in order to profit richly from its results.



Netanyahu, Biden and Trump alike have acted quite “happy” about stealing the Palestinians’ lands and building a casino on what was once Gaza—as well as drilling right off shore for natural gas. These genocidaires have expressed no qualms in killing Palestinians by military force, starvation and disease. Trump is even now talking about marching the remaining Palestinians out of their homeland of Gaza in a very similar fashion to what happened to the indigenous tribes along the Trail of Tears.

Note also how Jackson and Van Buren were fine with “free speech” being abrogated in order to keep the Cherokee from discussing the unfairness of being forcibly removed from their lands. Whites who spoke up for Native Americans were also punished for their speech. Trump isn’t the first president then to take away freedom of speech away from both citizens and “non-citizens” alike—and Native Americans were considered “non-citizens” until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

“But Trump is trying to take over Canada—and Greenland!” I hear the neoliberals crying. “We’ve never done anything like that before!” And yet… it’s all too obvious that Americans have taken lands that weren’t theirs. Doesn’t the removal of the southeastern tribes from their homelands prove this?

The United States bought the Louisiana Purchase from France (that stole it from its native inhabitants, of course) in 1803. And sorry to break this to you, but yes, the US government has forced other countries into giving over their lands at gunpoint. Zinn describes how the US became a coast-to-coast nation in the eighth chapter of his book:

James Polk, a Democrat, an expansionist... on the night of his inauguration, confided to his Secretary of the Navy that one of his main objectives was the acquisition of California. His order to General Taylor to move troops to the Rio Grande was a challenge to the Mexicans. (…) Ordering troops to the Rio Grande, into territory inhabited by Mexicans, was clearly a provocation. (…)

All that was needed in the spring of 1846 was a military incident to begin the war that Polk wanted. It came in April...[Taylor] sent a dispatch to Polk: “Hostilities may now be considered commenced.”



In case you’re scratching your head and wondering what was going on in the 1840s between the US and the fairly new nation of Mexico, please read A People’s History of the United States, and take a good look at a map of North America. All of Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah were a part of Mexico at that time. The US military slaughtered thousands of innocent Mexican villagers, soldiers, and Native Americans. The US Army forced the Mexican government into capitulating and “selling” their northern lands—more than half their territory—to the US for a mere pittance. The mainstream media, called “newspapers” at the time of the war, were all for stealing Mexico’s northern provinces, too, even if some notable Americans, such as Henry David Thoreau, weren’t.

So, stealing Greenland from Denmark and even occupying Canada isn’t a new concept for the US government. Donald Trump is no James Polk, but with our nuclear weapons and bloated military budget in the year 2025, he doesn’t have to have a conniving General Taylor to come up with an excuse to invade and take over anyone’s land. He’s good at making up excuses all by himself. (And the mainstream media will play along, too.)



US history repeats itself constantly, but it doesn’t have to. Now that you realize that the US doesn’t have a shiny clean track record when it comes to committing genocide and land grabs, make a vow to never let these terrible things happen ever again.

Instead of repeating history, let’s make history. Americans can stop the destructive cycle of capitalist-imperialist expansionism by refusing to cooperate with military moves made against other countries.

But how? First off, we can keep our young people out of the military and, if a draft is instituted, help them avoid it. We can also boycott, strike, and protest against the military-industrial complex and the billionaires who are profiting from genocide, war, and land grabs. Hit them where it really hurts—their bank accounts.

For example, if War Machine factory workers all walked out and refused to build weapons, bullets, bombs, fighter jets, and tanks, then the military will be deprived the tools it needs to start and expand needless and immoral wars. We could then re-tool these factories to build useful things that promote peace—such as converting aircraft carriers over into hospital ships.

To preserve your free speech, simply don’t cave in and shut up whenever Trump and company attempt to take it away. Yes, you could very well be arrested and jailed. Do it anyway. Start class action civil lawsuits demanding our rights be respected. No matter what they threaten you with, keep protesting and speaking out boldly. Never stop fighting back.



Do all you can to protect our non-citizen residents who aren’t being given the same protections as citizens (as of this writing). Refuse to cooperate with ICE and their illegal raids. Video these unlawful abductions and write down every detail you can remember about them. Don’t let people forget what is happening.

Remember that the US Bill of Rights and due process before the law are for everyone, and they can just as easily be taken away from everyone—citizens included. Americans can’t afford to sit back and think they’re safe because of their race or social status. ICE is breaking the law now. No one is safe.

We the People are on the verge of making history. But we must act boldly and take back our country from the corrupt, greedy governmental elites and their billionaire backers. We must banish them across a metaphorical Mississippi, never to return. The world can’t wait. We’ve got to stop these monsters from repeating our sordid history!

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack ... -repeat-it

[blindpig]

Collapsing Empire: The Delusion of US Air Power
Posted by Internationalist 360° on April 9, 2025
Kit Klarenberg


A Yemeni stands in the ruins of a US bombing attack, March 20th

Ever since March 15th, Washington has barraged Sanaa from the sky, killing and injuring countless innocent civilians while destroying vital infrastructure. For example, on April 2nd, US jets targeted a reservoir in western Yemen, cutting off access to water for over 50,000 people. Three days later, Donald Trump gloatingly posted a horrific video on social media of a tribal gathering being incinerated in a US airstrike – the President falsely claimed the individuals were in fact “Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack.”



In a chilling coincidence, the bloodcurdling clip was published on the 15th anniversary of the release of “Collateral Murder” by WikiLeaks, gut-wrenching footage filmed three years earlier of US Apache helicopter pilots firing indiscriminately at a group of Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists, while sickly cackling at the carnage they were inflicting. While that disclosure caused international outcry and scandal, and made WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange an internationally wanted man, openly advertising unconscionable war crimes is now apparently formal US government policy.

US officials have pledged that renewed hostilities against Yemen will continue “indefinitely”, while Trump has bragged how “relentless strikes” have “decimated” AnsarAllah. Yet, on April 4th, the New York Times reported Pentagon officials are “privately” briefing that while the current bombing campaign “is consistently heavier than strikes conducted by the Biden administration”, the effort has achieved “only limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast, largely underground arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers.” AnsarAllah’s anti-genocide Red Sea blockade thus endures untrammelled.

Moreover, “in just three weeks, the Pentagon has used $200 million worth of munitions, in addition to the immense operational and personnel costs to deploy two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 bombers and fighter jets, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses to the Middle East.” The operation’s total cost to date could exceed “well over $1 billion by next week.” This not only means “supplemental funds” for the operation need to be sought from Congress, but there are grave internal anxieties about ammunition availability:

“So many precision munitions are being used, especially advanced long-range ones, that some Pentagon contingency planners are growing concerned about overall Navy stocks and implications for any situation in which the United States would have to ward off an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China.”

The New York Times also observed the White House hasn’t indicated “why it thinks its campaign against the group will succeed”, after the Biden administration’s long-running Operation Prosperity Guardian embarrassingly failed to break the Red Sea’s blockade. The answer is simple – for three decades, the Empire has been consumed by a dangerously self-deluded belief in the primacy of air power, over all other forms of warfare. Ergo, the Trump administration believes that if only it intensifies Yemen’s bombardment, AnsarAllah will finally crumble.

‘Significantly Damaged’

In April 1996, then USAF Chief of Staff Ronald R Fogleman boldly declared that a “new American way of war” was emerging. While traditionally the Empire had “relied on large forces employing mass, concentration, and firepower to attrit enemy forces and defeat them,” now technological advances and “unique military advantages” – specifically in the field of air power – could be used “to compel an adversary to do our will at the least cost to the US in lives and resources.”

At this time, the Empire was riding high on the perceived success of NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force, an 11-day saturation bombing of Bosnia conducted the previous August/September. Multiple US officials enthusiastically attributed the campaign to ending the three-year-long civil war in the former Yugoslav republic, by precipitating a negotiated settlement. They omitted to mention the airstrikes’ predominant military utility was allowing US-armed, trained, and directed Bosniak and Croat proxy forces to overrun Bosnian Serb positions without significant opposition, or their brazen sabotage of prior peace deals.



How TIME Magazine reported Operation Deliberate Force

Nonetheless, the narrative that wars can be won via airpower alone, and the US and its allies should invest in and structure their military machines accordingly, palpably percolated thereafter. The illegal March – June 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia provided the Empire with an opportunity to put this theory to the test. For 78 straight days, NATO relentlessly blitzed civilian, government, and industrial infrastructure throughout the country, killing untold innocent people – including children – and disrupting daily life for millions.
The purported purpose of this onslaught was to prevent a planned genocide of Kosovo’s Albanian population by Yugoslav forces. As a May 2000 British parliamentary committee concluded however, it was only after the bombing began that Belgrade began assaulting the province. Moreover, this effort was explicitly concerned with neutralising the CIA and MI6-backed Kosovo Liberation Army, an Al Qaeda-linked extremist group, not attacking Albanian citizens. Meanwhile, in September 2001, a UN court determined Yugoslavia’s actions in Kosovo were not genocidal in nature, or intent.

On June 3rd 1999, Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic folded under Russian pressure, agreeing to withdraw Belgrade’s forces from Kosovo. While Western officials celebrated a resounding victory for NATO, and airpower more generally, the mainstream media – at least initially – told a very different story. The LA Times observed that the Yugoslav army “still has 80% to 90% of its tanks, 75% of its most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles and 60% of its MIG fighter planes.” Meanwhile, its key barracks and ammunition depots weren’t impaired one iota.

The New York Times reported that post-war Kosovo was bereft “of the scorched carcasses of tanks or other military equipment NATO officials had expected to find.” While NATO and Pentagon apparatchiks “[claimed] to have significantly damaged” Yugoslav forces, the outlet acknowledged Belgrade’s units withdrawing from Kosovo “seemed spirited and defiant rather than beaten.” They took with them hundreds of tanks, personnel carriers, artillery batteries, vehicles and “military equipment loaded on trucks” completely unscathed by the bombing campaign.

‘Campaign Analysis’

Contemporary declassified British Ministry of Defence files amply underline the catastrophic failure of the Empire’s blitzkrieg of Yugoslavia. Once Milosevic finally capitulated and NATO and UN ‘peacekeepers’ were granted unimpeded access to Kosovo, they struggled to find a single “burnt out tank”, or other indications of vehicle or equipment losses on the ground. A June 7th “campaign analysis” noted, “NATO took a lot longer, required a lot more effort and damaged less than perhaps we believed we could achieve at the start of the air campaign.”

It added that Yugoslav “war-fighting doctrine” placed “great emphasis on dispersal, the use of camouflage, dummy targets, concealment and bunkers” to avoid detection, and “early assessments indicate that they appear to have applied this doctrine very successfully.” Adverse weather conditions were also routinely exploited as cover for anti-KLA operations. The memo further recorded “there was no evidence…of disintegration of Serb forces in Kosovo,” with Yugoslav military operations continuing apace until Milosevic agreed to withdraw from the province, “and beyond”.


A Yugoslav dummy tank that fooled NATO, in Kosovo

Yet, these damning observations remained secret. At a June 11th 1999 press conference, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Henry Shelton proudly displayed a variety of colourful charts, boasting how hundreds of Yugoslav tanks, personnel carriers and artillery pieces had been decimated by NATO, without the alliance suffering a single casualty. His crooked accounting of the bombing remained universal mainstream gospel, until a May 2000 Newsweek investigation exposed the wide-ranging “coverup” via which the Pentagon had spun the “ineffective” assault as a resounding success.

When NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark, who oversaw the bombing, learned of the pronounced lack of damage to the Yugoslav military on-the-ground in Kosovo, he dispatched a dedicated team of USAF investigators to the province. They “spent weeks combing Kosovo by helicopter and by foot,” and turned up evidence of just 14 destroyed tanks. Meanwhile, of the 744 strikes on Yugoslav military equipment and installations claimed by Pentagon officials, just 58 were confirmed.

By contrast, USAF identified ample evidence of the Yugoslav military’s extraordinary skill at deception. They found a key bridge had been protected from NATO bombers “by constructing, 300 yards upstream, a fake bridge made of polyethylene sheeting stretched over the river”. NATO “destroyed” the “phony bridge” many times. Additionally, “artillery pieces were faked out of long black logs stuck on old truck wheels, and “an anti-aircraft missile launcher was fabricated from the metal-lined paper used to make European milk cartons.”

Flummoxed, “Clark insisted that the Serbs had hidden their damaged equipment and that the team hadn’t looked hard enough.” So a new report was fabricated wholecloth, validating the fiction NATO’s destruction of Yugoslav forces had been extensive. Newsweek noted its findings were “so devoid of hard data that Pentagon officials jokingly called it ‘fiber-free’.” An official Department of Defense “After-Action Report to Congress” on the bombing campaign cited the report’s figures, although stressed no supporting evidence was forthcoming. With eerie prescience, Newsweek concluded:

“[This] distortion could badly mislead future policymakers…After the November 2000 presidential election, the Pentagon will go through one of its quadrennial reviews, assigning spending priorities. The Air Force will claim the lion’s share…The risk is policymakers and politicians will become even more wedded to myths like ‘surgical strikes’. The lesson of Kosovo is civilian bombing works, though it raises moral qualms…Against military targets, high-altitude bombing is overrated. Any commander in chief who does not face up to those hard realities will be fooling himself.”

‘Incredibly Different’

The “distortion” that NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia was a military triumph has endured ever since. Not only has it served as justification for multiple subsequent calamitous Western “interventions”, such as the 2011 destruction of Libya, but USAF continues to claim “the lion’s share” of US defence spending. According to 2024 figures, over a quarter of Washington’s total defence budget – $216.1 billion – is earmarked for the Air Force. Additionally, $202.6 billion is spent on the Navy, which typically operates in close tandem with USAF.



Intimidatingly large these figures may appear on paper, but they do not translate into serious war-fighting capability, as Operation Prosperity Guardian amply underscored. A little-noticed July 2024 Associated Press report on the return home of US fighter pilots after nine months of failing to thwart AnsarAllah’s Red Sea blockade noted that battling an enemy capable of fighting back “in the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II” had been deeply psychologically ravaging for all concerned.


USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and other warships head to the Red Sea, Novemeber 2023

As a result, Pentagon officials were investigating how to tend to thousands of pilots and sailors adversely affected by their involvement in the bruising effort, “including counseling and treatment for possible post-traumatic stress.” One pilot told Associated Press, “most of [us]…weren’t used to being fired on given the nation’s previous military engagements in recent decades.” He described the experience of AnsarAllah’s retaliation as “incredibly different” and “traumatizing”, as getting shot at is “something that we don’t think about a lot.”

A new experience it may be – but it’s one Washington needs to urgently adapt to. A July 2024 RAND Corporation report found the US military was woefully ill-equipped to sustain a major conflict with “peer-level competitors” such as China for any length of time, while facing significant threats from “relatively unsophisticated actors” such as AnsarAllah, who have been “able to obtain and use modern technology (e.g., drones) to strategic effect.”

Since then, Axios has reported Pentagon weapons procurer Bill LaPlante – a journeyman engineer and physicist – is awed by AnsarAllah’s use of “increasingly sophisticated weapons,” including missiles that “can do things that are just amazing.” He claims the Resistance group’s capabilities are “getting scary”. Once the US has exhausted itself yet again failing to crush AnsarAllah, we could see more of its arsenal in play – and in turn, another historic defeat of the Empire, as Yemen inflicted over the course of Operation Prosperity Guardian.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/04/ ... air-power/

[blindpig]

Think Tank Report Makes Clear Minerals Are Key Drivers of U.S. Foreign Policy
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - April 16, 2025 0


Philip Agee [Source: npr.org]

The CSIS report makes clear that this yearning has become more acute in the 21st century, when strategic minerals are necessary to power high tech computer and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and to advance the so-called clean energy revolution.

Donald Trump has been candid about the importance of rare-earth minerals to the 21st century U.S. economy, seeking to broker a deal with Ukraine to secure access to its rare-earth minerals in exchange for continued U.S. military aid. Trump has also talked about directly colonizing Greenland—heavily valued because of its untapped mineral wealth—and incorporating mineral rich Canada as the 51st U.S. state.


[Source: cartoonmovement.com]

The book launch for the CSIS’s critical minerals study was hosted by U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-IN), who sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot specializing in political propaganda and helping to coordinate regime-change operations.


Todd Young [Source: ntd.com]

The report starts out by noting that “mining is an inextricable part of the American story. What starts as rock in the ground goes on to become the inputs that build America’s homes and buildings, transportation systems, energy generation and transmission, defense systems, and technological capabilities. Mining is the foundation that allowed the United States to be a military leader, providing the minerals needed to manufacture tanks, missiles, fighter jets and warships. It is the reason computers, phones, and iPads exist. Mining is the reason we have energy and can turn on lights every morning.”

A pivotal concern is that China is the major producer of 29 of the 50 minerals identified as critical by the U.S. Geological Survey.

China’s willingness to weaponize these minerals was epitomized by its initiating export restrictions, including complete bans, on antimony, gallium and germanium. The report warned that China has developed a “stranglehold on minerals processing, refining between 40 and 90 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth elements, graphite, lithium, cobalt, and copper.”

The authors wrote that “reducing reliance on China and creating resilient mineral supply chains is one of the most bipartisan priorities in Washington, D.C.”

Making the World Safe for Silicon Valley to Flourish
At the start of World War II, the Roosevelt administration signed into law the Strategic and Critical Materials Stockpiling Act of 1939 establishing strategic material supply reserves. In a letter to Congress, President Franklin D. Roosevelt noted that commercial stocks of vital raw resources in the U.S. were low and that, “in the event of unlimited warfare on sea and in the air, possession of a reserve of these essential supplies might prove of vital importance.”


Franklin D. Roosevelt [Source: clickamericana.com]

According to historian Jonathan Marshall, control of Southeast Asia’s rich mineral resources was the key determinant underlying U.S. war provocations directed against Japan that led to the Pacific War. Japan had established a regional empire coming on the heels of the decline of European colonial empires that threatened U.S. control over Southeast Asia’s mineral wealth.[1]

Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. raised the specter of the Soviet threat to justify continued imperialistic intervention designed to heighten access to mineral resources needed to power the U.S. economy and military.

Well-known examples include the CIA coup in Iran in the 1950s to secure access to oil and the 1973 CIA-backed coup in Chile after President Salvador Allende nationalized Chile’s copper industry (which was dominated previously by two U.S. firms, Anaconda, and Kennecott).


The 1973 Chilean coup had a lot to do with copper. [Source: nytimes.com]

Another was the 1965 CIA-backed Indonesia coup and genocide, which paved the way for the exploitation of Indonesia’s rich mineral wealth by Western-based multi-national corporations and clear-cutting of Indonesian forests.


Scene from the 1965 CIA-backed Indonesian coup and genocide. [Source: hrw.org]


Thomas L. Friedman—who is known as the imperial messenger. [Source: libquotes.com]

In the post-Cold War period, the U.S. government became more open about intervening in countries to access their mineral resources. Donald Trump, as an example, admitted that the U.S. was in Syria to steal its oil. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote some years before Trump took office that “the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Sights on Zambia
One country that the U.S. ruling elite has set its sights on now is Zambia because it is a leading producer of copper, which the CSIS report specifies as a “necessary material for many of the advanced technologies that are essential to the modern global economy, including in infrastructure, clean energy, electronics and automotives; copper wires connect electrical grids, integrated circuits, and telecommunication systems.”


Clean energy revolution? Residents go about their daily routine with the pollution caused by Mopani Copper Mines in the background. [Source: trendsnafrica.com]


President Hakainde Hichilema is the richest man in Zambia, with a net worth of $389 million. [Source: Steve Brown]

CovertAction Magazine has previously reported on the expansion of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in Zambia, the Biden administration’s gifting of four Bell helicopters, and U.S. support for the right-wing government of Hakainde Hichilema, which has loosened regulations and lowered taxes on foreign mining companies operating in Zambia to enable a $2 billion expansion of copper production.[2]

In January 2025, Citizens First Party Chairperson for Mines and Minerals Committee Felistus Mumba, criticized the Hichilema administration for suspending a 15% export duty on precious stones and metals and for secrecy surrounding mining agreements, citing KoBold Metals, a Silicon Valley-based company backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, planning a $2.3 billion investment in the Mingomba copper mine project.[3]

While the U.S. provided Zambia with $250 million in foreign aid in 2024, Hichilema’s pro-corporate policies[4] have made him extremely unpopular in the capital Lusaka and the copperbelt area due to the economic hardship experienced by Zambians living there, according to The Lusaka Times. Mumba said that “it is unconscionable that Zambians go to bed hungry while the country sits on vast mineral wealth.”


Felistus Mumba [Source: Zambiamonitor.com]

Harsh neoliberal policies have coincided with a mounting campaign of repression targeting Zambia’s socialist party, which developed a progressive manifesto pledging to reverse Zambia’s slide into privatization and de-industrialization and calling for re-assertion of national control over the copper industry.[5]

The situation in Zambia no doubt will provide a blueprint for other countries possessing vital minerals, whose socialist parties will face the same kind of repression.

Semi-Conductors, Military Advantage and a Clean Energy Revolution?
The CSIS report emphasizes that semi-conductors, foundational to modern life because of their use in smart phones, computers, medical devices, automotives and military applications, are mineral intensive, requiring essential quantities of gallium, germanium, palladium, silicon, arsenic and titanium.

The authors write that “the production of these resources is largely concentrated in foreign adversaries, exposing a severe national security risk.”

This risk necessitates building up the defense industry and military, which are reliant on strategic minerals, hence creating an ever-greater demand for them.

According to the report, China, unfortunately, is acquiring new weapons systems roughly five to six times more quickly than the U.S. based on its control over world mineral supplies, which the U.S. needs to try to offset.

Electric vehicles and renewable energy, like wind farms and solar energy plants, also require large mineral inputs whose supply chains are increasingly dominated by China. Wind farms and solar energy facilities require more mineral inputs than conventional power plants, enhancing yet greater demand for the minerals.

The Biden administration’s climate initiative, providing tax credits, loans and grants for renewable energy, does not seem all that environmentally friendly in the latter context, particularly if one considers the environmental effects of mining operations that pollute rivers, poison the air, despoil the land, and displace indigenous people.


Protest against Vedanta Resources for polluting the Kafue River and looting Zambia’s wealth. [Source: theguardian.com]

Biden and the Democratic Party’s hawkish foreign policy, packaged under the false veneer of democracy promotion, makes best sense in light of the need to extract more and more minerals to fuel the “clean energy” revolution.

How clean this revolution is should be more openly questioned, including by environmentalists and progressives who support the Democratic Party.

Domestic Mining
The CSIS report laments that it takes on average 29 years to build a mine in the U.S. because of a “Byzantine” permit system and “burdensome” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations along with bureaucratic inefficiency.

The U.S. economy was in the late 19th century rooted in mining industries, which gave rise to radical labor groups like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) because of the exploitative working conditions that are prevalent today in many countries.


[Source: archivesfoundation.org]

One of the chapters in the CSIS report advocates for streamlining the permit system for mining projects in the U.S., considered to be socially and environmentally responsible to allow for revitalization of domestic mining.

Sugarcoating Modern-Day Colonialism
The report is generally written from a nationalist perspective that places primacy on the U.S. wresting control over mineral supply chains from China and securing access to mineral deposits around the world. This is to be achieved in part by better developing the “defense-industrial base” and placing the U.S. more on a war footing than it already is.

The pitfalls of the approach are never explored nor the likelihood of heightened military and covert military operations that have a disastrous track record, especially for the subject countries.

Further, there is the danger of outright war with China, which the CSIS report makes clear the U.S. could never win.

Lead author Gracelin Baskaran, a South African economist with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University who worked for the World Bank, claims that “Western companies are generally more responsible, environmentally conscious, and attentive to human rights and labor conditions [than non-Western ones],”[6] which history does not bear out.


Gracelin Baskaran [Source: csis.org].

Baskaran believes that a framework can be worked out where resource-rich countries would benefit from an expansion
of mining operations by Western companies. Zambia, however, is indicative of the historical pattern by which the U.S. government helps to secure a privileged operating environment for Western corporations whereby they pay limited royalty taxes and can get away with exploiting the local labor force and plundering the local environment.

Furthermore, the U.S. government frequently orchestrates covert and military operations to help secure a favorable business climate for these companies that often result in the deliberate enflaming of ethnic divisions and spread of endemic violence.[7]

Baskaran praises the Biden administration’s $600 million Lobito Corridor project—an infrastructure project linking the ports of Lobito on Angola’s Atlantic Coast to Zambia through the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which contains some of the world’s largest deposits of critical minerals like cobalt and copper.


[Source: msn.com]

Baskaran’s viewpoint is challenged by Dady Saleh, a Congolese economic analyst in tune with local opinion, who told Al Jazeera that the Lobito Corridor was “neo-colonialist—“an organized sell off of the region’s natural resources in a capitalist system” by which locals would only benefit “with crumbs.”

Saleh further said that the Lobido Corridor agreement was returning Africa “to the old days, where railroads were made to facilitate the transport of our raw materials by the colonialists,” adding that through the project “we’ve opened up our economy to modern plunderers.”


Dady Saleh [Source: kivuavenir.com]

Baskaran would do well to consider Saleh’s perspective, take a history class, and study the writings of Philip Agee, Walter Rodney (author of the book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa) and others with a similar viewpoint.

Of course, if she did that, she would be out of a job. The think tank she works for provides guiding principles for the U.S. plutocracy that is intent on continuing the pattern of destructive policies from which they reap enormous profits.

Trump Administration Goes All Out For Minerals in Africa
The Trump administration’s brazen mineral grab is evident in a pending deal with DRC President Felix Tshisekedi in which the U.S. would provide security assistance and stronger diplomatic backing and help the DRC defend itself from Rwanda’s invasion in exchange for allowing the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to underwrite more U.S. investments in the DRC’s mining sector. The latter is estimated to be potentially valued at over $20 trillion.

The Financial Times reported that the Bill Gates-backed mining and artificial intelligence start-up, KoBold Metals—which also has investments in Zambia—is eyeing the huge but legally disputed Manono lithium deposits, which the new agreement would potentially give them the opportunity to excavate.

Other companies that may benefit from the new agreement are U.S.-based Orion Resources Partners, according to The Financial Times, U.S.-Canadian mining investor Robert Friedland, British-Australian-Canadian mining giant Rio Tinto, and Saudi Arabia’s United Mining.


Mining area in the DRC that U.S. companies would like to be able to exploit. [Source: msn.com]

Ironically, the U.S. has long supported Rwanda and provided it with weaponry and intelligence support as part of a ploy to access the DRC’s rich mineral wealth that includes abundant supplies of cobalt, lithium and copper.

In South Africa, the Trump administration has applied crippling tariffs to try and keep the country in line, though excluded raw materials—platinum group metals, coal, gold, manganese and chrome—according to Creamer’s Mining Weekly.

This is characteristic of the Trump administration’s strategy that was outlined in an April 4 Wall Street Journal article “Minerals Become Ultimate Bargaining Chip in Trump’s Diplomatic Deals.”

It stated that “President Trump is pressing for access to mineral rights across the globe, hoping to outduel China in a global competition for raw materials to fuel U.S. military and industrial might. [Trump] has pushed the State Department to make mineral deals that would bolster U.S. industry and weapons, U.S. officials said. He has instructed the Pentagon to plan to refine metals on military bases and protect U.S.-operated mines in dangerous areas, the officials said.”[8]

So much for humanitarian intervention. The real impetus behind U.S. foreign policy for generations is laid out very clearly here, as in the CSIS report and writings and speeches of Philip Agee.[9]



1.See Jonathan Marshall, To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). ↑

2.In 2020, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—an off-shoot of the CIA—spent $313,000 in Zambia to finance civil society groups that may have included some of Hichilema’s supporters. Then in 2021, the NED provided $601,025 in grants, including to bloggers supportive of Hichilema and opposed to Edgar Lungu in the 2021 election. Hichilema’s government’s pro-U.S. leanings were apparent in his diverting from Zimbabwe and South Africa by voting at the UN to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

3.Other major corporations with mining ventures in Zambia with deep Wall Street connections and ties to the U.S. and Canadian political establishments include First Quantum Minerals, Anglo-American, Rio Tinto and Barrick Gold. Zambia is also seen as a potential source of nickel, graphite and rare-earth elements. Accusing the UPND-led government of prioritizing multi-national corporations over Zambia’s own citizens, Mumba warned that Hichilema’s policies would contribute to the ravaging of Zambia’s environment and argued that the suspension of the export tax would make it easier for “unscrupulous players to exploit resources while Zambia sees little benefit.” Mumba added that “the large-scale mining corporations, dominated by foreign ownership, stand to gain the most, leaving small-scale Zambian miners unable to compete.”

4.Hichilema refers to himself as “Zambia’s chief marketing officer” tasked with attracting foreign investment into Zambia. He has agreed to an IMF program imposing austerity on Zambians who are already living under extremely difficult circumstances with a dearth of public services. To his credit, Hichilema has advanced free public schooling. ↑

5.Reagan Kashinga, a socialist party member from the Copperbelt district, said that the UPND Government under Hichilema has “betrayed the forefathers by putting national and natural resources in the hands of the foreigners who were chased at independence.” Kashinga additionally said that President Hakainde Hichilema’s “love for foreigners and rich people at the expense of the majority suffering Zambians” was “alarming.” ↑

6.Gracelin Baskaran and Duncan Wood (Eds.), Critical Minerals and the Future of the U.S. Economy (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2025), 97. ↑

7.The historic pattern is detailed in many books, including William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998). ↑

8.The Wall Street Journal reported that senior officials including national security adviser Mike Waltz were “leading the hunt for mining contracts. Massad Boulos, father-in-law of Trump’s daughter, Tiffany Trump, is helping the administration obtain mining contracts as a senior adviser for African affairs.” ↑

9.Only Agee, to his credit though, raised any moral qualms, which is what led him to being blacklisted. ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... gn-policy/