And thanks for continuing to write about these issues. It's important for people to see how much the government's propaganda that they have been bombarding on us for decades has worked on Americans and there has to be a way for them to start questioning why this country has been at continual war for the 15 years after 9/11.
And not just this time frame but pretty much the whole time since the pilgrims landed on the shores of this country.
I remember playing cowboys and Indians when I was a kid because I learned in school that the Indians were the bad guys. That means that I have been hit with their lies my entire life.
And I look at like being raised in a certain religion and how hard it was to understand that it was poppy cock!
I don't remember where I saw this, but it stuck with me for years and it hit home.
I knew that Israel has been pulling our government's strings regarding the wars in the Middle East and getting our country and our military to remove anyone who threaten them and wants to be the only superpower in the Middle East, but I didn't realize how far back it went.

‘In 1914 any American would have laughed to scorn the idea that in three years time he would be struggling and suffering in France for the sake of affairs which had no connection with those of his own country.

‘And yet, when 1917 came, the same man enlisted enthusiastically. Every soldier whom we happened to interview and questioned as to his personal motives for fighting, invariably replied: 'we are fighting for democracy'. They were one step ahead of their fellow soldiers from other nations, who went for their own country's sake.

‘It is only when we realize that France was invaded by hundreds of thousands of inhabitants from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois, Wyoming, California, Louisiana, and subsequently from Ontario, Manitoba, Rhodesia and New South Wales, whose only possible motive was to hasten the triumph of democracy, that we begin to understand something of the power of Israel. The power to stir up a whole nation of solid, egotistical and utilitarian individuals, and to persuade them that their greatest privilege is to set out and get themselves killed at the uttermost ends of the earth, with no hope of gain for themselves or their children and almost without their understanding against or for whom they are fighting, or why, is a simply incredible phenomenon which makes one afraid when one comes to think about it.’

E. Malynski: La Démocratie Victorieuse, 1929

I think it's on Netflix...about Syrian civilians running INTO BATTLES to rescue others.
If this doesn't wake people up, nothing will.

Gus, I hope you reconsider the position that bringing back the draft would stop the war in a year. It often comes up in discussions about the volunteer army (which is just a current version of the old 18th century recruit-mercenaries-among-the-impoverished scheme). But people forget that the first anti-draft demos during the Vietnam war were in 1963; the first public draft card burnings were in NYC in '64. The last helicopters pulled out of Vietnam in 1973.

It took 10 years to force the US out.

The only thing providing more cannon fodder to the defense department--which is what the draft does--is give them more people to commit their crimes against humanity.

Our survival depends on it. Anyone else would mean we'd have a chance.

That is a powerful piece of video. What is it from?

The IMF, globalization, and all the other losers

Apart from the fast increasingly brainless political ‘discussions’ that don’t deserve the name, in the US and UK and beyond, there are the transnational organizations, NATO, IMF, EU and all those things, all suffocating in their own hubris, things I’ve dealt with before in for instance Globalization Is Dead, But The Idea Is Not and Why There is Trump. But none of it still seems to have trickled through anywhere that I can see.

The end of growth exposes the stupidity and ignorance of all but (and even that’s a maybe) a precious few (of our) ‘leaders’. There is no other way this could have run, because an era of growth simply selects for different people to float to the top of the pond than a period of contraction does. Can we agree on that?

And in the western media consensus, it comprises anything from Trump to Beppe Grillo, via Hungary’s Orban and Nigel Farage, Spain’s Podemos, Greece’s Syriza and Germany’s AfD. All these completely different movements have one thing only in common: they protest the failed and fast deteriorating status quo, and receive a lot of support from their people for doing that.

Of course the traditional right wing smells the opportunity too, so Hillary (yeah, she’s right wing) and Theresa May and Sarkozy and Merkel are all orchestrating sharp turns to the right, away from their once comfortable seats in the center. They all sense that power will not be emanating from the center going forward, and it’s power, much more than principles, that they are after.

Globalization is done. And while we can discuss whether that’s of necessity or not, and I continue to contend that the end of growth equals the end of all centralization including globalization, fact is that globalization was never designed to share anything at all, other than perhaps wealth among elites, and low wages among everyone else.

The EU and IMF have not delivered on what they promised, in the same way that traditional parties have not, from the US to UK to basically all of Europe. They promised growth, and growth is gone. They may have delivered for their pay masters, but they lost the rest of the world.

in a week or so.

I have work to do and it seems that reading anything these days, isn't going to help.

After World War II the US Army began importing Nazi rocket scientists to help the military make intercontinental ballistic missiles. Werner von Braun was cleansed for public exposure and even used to make appearances on The Wonderful World Of Walt Disney. Then there were the other scientists, from Germany and Japan who worked in concentration camps on all sorts of medical atrocities.

The CIA took it a step further. The Congress For Freedom was supposed to be a private charity that imported freedom fighters and people fleeing from Communism from Europe into the US. They were actually Nazis and Nazi collaborators, and the CIA's intention was to push immigrant communities rightward (and you can't get much farther to the right than Nazis). Not surprisingly, Ronald Reagan, who been an FBI informer in Hollywood during the Red Scare, was the spokesman for the CFF. One of the main groups that the CIA imported (with a similar resettlement program in Canada) was the OUN-B, Nazi collaborators not only against ethnic Russians in Ukraine during WWII, but they were the main perpetrators of the Jewish extermination program in Ukraine, where a million Jews were murdered during the war. Ukrainians took over the killing because the constant slaughter was ruining the esprit de corps among the German soldiers. The Ukrainians performed that mass murder with glee.

After WWII the CIA, using Reinhard Gehlen's eastern Nazi spy organization, supported these Nazi collaborating murderers after the war into the fifties to fight a guerrilla war against the Soviets.

Eventually, these neo-Nazis were integrated into immigrant communities and those among them who showed leadership skills were backed by the CIA. They included Hungary's Arrow Cross, Yugoslavia's Ustache and others. Many of their children grew up to be Reagan Democrats.

The story about these Nazis became news for a brief time during the 1988 election when the fascist content of the ethnic heritage unit of the Republican Party was revealed by reporter Russ Bellant and reported in THE NATION. When the Iron Curtain collapsed the US sent some of these fascists, imported and homegrown, back into eastern Europe to infiltrate the political processes there.

Many of the people sent back into Ukraine were tied to the OUN-B. When the US backed the coup against the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, it backed a combination of oligarchs and street fascists. Eastern Ukraine, which is more heavily ethnic Russian, refused to recognize the Nazi coup, and thus began that civil war.

Here are some links for readers to catch up on this tawdry part of our history:

A 2014 NATION interview with Russ Bellant: https://www.thenation.com/article/seven-decades-nazi-collaboration-ameri...

An entire issue (Fall 1990) of COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN which is dedicated to the CIA using fascists and Nazi collaborators as politicians to be insinuated into eastern Europe. In the issue is also an essay by Carl Oglesby about the Treaty of Fort Hunt, which brought Gehlen's Nazi spy organization into the CIA: https://ia800505.us.archive.org/1/items/CovertActionInformationBulletinN...

Christopher Simpson's book, BLOWBACK, is generally considered the best source for the post-WWII Nazi importation programs. The blowback in the title is essentially, when you import and support Nazis and fascists into your country, your country gets more and more fascist. Bellant's book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, focused on how these CIA-imported Nazis became an integral part of the Republican Party. In some of the CAIB essays there are descriptions of these fascists using the resources of US's National Endowment for Democracy to help them infiltrate east European political movements.

In 1993 this fascist work by the NED began becoming bipartisan. Not suprisingly, the Clintons have been part of this. The NED has been used in collaboration with CIA destabilization programs around the world. Hillary Clinton's State Department has worked hand in hand with the NED and the CIA to overthrow the elected government in Ukraine in 2014.

Liberals have long been corrupt and, I strongly believe, are acting as place-holders for the pathological corporate-rep Cons, their pay-masters apparently realizing that they could not again cheat Harper in without riots.

Had the NDP stuck to their democratic socialist platform, they'd have achieved their briefly-anticipated landslide in a real election, but Mulcair is weak/corrupted, and the division allowed for some rather suspicious election results on what was supposed to be nation-wide strategic voting, certainly in my long-term NDP province, supposedly with a solid wave of early voters for the corrupt Liberals, later overcome by a solid mass of CON???!!! voters?

This after Harper passing a 'law'???!!! that Elections Canada was gagged from informing the public about electoral fraud. (And with only Elizabeth May of the Green Party consistently fighting in Parliament for the people and environment - and illegally shut out by Harper as a result, and out of the electoral debates, as well.

So the Cons are in provincially and the healthcare system here (and no doubt all other social programs benefiting the people,) slated for local as well as corporate assault, All Ready For Hillary and the corporate coups she'll impose on our next-door neighbours and thereby also validate in all other countries with bribed/bullied/BSed public officials accepting these illegal and unconstitutional coups - and which Harper untraditionally and, I believe, illegally signed ('for fun' or some such nonsense) as he was in the process of finally being booted out of his stolen Prime Ministerial position. (And signally/typically failed to keep his promise of resigning as Con Party Dictator 'if the votes weren't there' - perhaps the Koch brothers and others were unable to find another such corrupt replacement in all of Canada?)

Our local police were fairly recently gifted a tank???!!! evidently to protect corporate interests against the overall pacific and typically non-gun-carrying citizens in our city. Grenades and bayonets were not mentioned; some may have been tucked inside the tank, for all I know. I suppose we'll find out later, if all goes wrong, as planned.

What stopped Vietnam was a bunch of Vietnamese people that, no matter how many B-52s dropped no matter how many bombs, they kept on fighting, kept on carrying war materiel through the jungle on trails, kept on shooting back. They never gave up, they were never going to give up, and they beat the US military. Coincidentally, there were anti-war protesters in America, doing just what they did before the Iraq War, with the same effectiveness. But took credit for stopping the war. Maybe they even believed it...like people praying for the sun to come back during an eclipse.