Promoting War as a Pandemic Rages

Both at home and abroad the US war machine continues its march toward empire collapse. Militarized police employ the same tactics that they use in foreign conflicts against our citizens...Snatching protesters off the streets into unmarked vehicles...Beating and shooting those who will not submit to their aggression...using federal troops to target cities run by political opponents. Meanwhile we are ratcheting up tensions with China as they are building alliances, roads, railways, solar infrastructure, and trade with others. Mike, the pompous one, has been in Europe threatening sanctions to those who are aiding in the pipeline construction and want to buy oil from Russia (and enlisting more aggression against China). We continue to stir the pot in Latin America. Our incompetence is on display with the handling of COVID in the US...managing the pandemic to maximize profit. The US has one major goal...to further enrich the elite...the people be damned.

I've posted the clip above a few times around the site, but I wanted to feature it for those who may have missed Danny's insights. His most recent article describes our view of some lives mattering more than others.
https://original.antiwar.com/danny_sjursen/2020/07/20/all-civilian-lives...

Think on it a moment: Washington’s record speaks for itself. Seen from the Potomac’s shores, the value of a civilian life almost directly correlates with how the US Government of the moment feels about the regime that man, woman, or child momentarily lives under. Consider it the obscenity of the arbitrary. A few examples should suffice, but one could fill volumes with consistent exemplars.

"Heroic" Libyan rebels – and proximate civilians – mattered once, and only once, President Barack Obama decided their bizarre but harmless-to-the-homeland dictator Colonel Gaddafi had to go. Yet, ten times as many Yemeni lives-extinguished (including at least 85,000 starved-to-death children) didn’t and don’t, because their killers are Washington’s oil-rich Saudi allies. In fact, a complicit US military even lent those theocratic state-terrorists a vital murder-logistics hand. See how the macabre game works?

But wait, there’s more:

[Pro-Western] Ukrainian lives matter because their perceived victimizers are "evil" Russians; Rohingya lives don’t since their oppressors work for the irrelevant Burmese government.
Uighur lives matter (well, maybe not to Trump) because China is an "enemy;" Kashmiri lives don’t since the "New" India is now a new "ally."
Venezuelan refugee lives matter because they fled a Maduro regime Washington loathes (and it can recruit among them for mercenary adventures against said Maduro); Palestinian refugees don’t since their far-worse and longer-running oppressors are friendly Israelis.

America’s military industrial complex and multiple presidential administrations have funneled several generations of soldiers through unwinnable wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq seemingly without qualms. What has emerged from these tragedies are thousands of traumatized young Americans bringing home wars and leaving behind millions of innocent civilians killed, wounded and forced to become refugees. But some of these former soldiers also came home with an urgent new perspective to share with their compatriots. That is the case of the two veterans on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” episode: Oscar-winning film director Oliver Stone and journalist Maj. Danny Sjursen.

audio or text
https://scheerpost.com/2020/07/24/oliver-stone-danny-sjursen-the-unbeara...

COVID continues its rampage across the US...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ (h/t Marie)

How, then, has Congress been spending its time? Here’s a simple answer: the Senate Armed Services Committee only recently passed a $740.5 billion “defense” budget for 2021. Hey, what do Americans need right now more than new Virginia class submarines and spending “$175 million to support stability in the submarine industrial base”? If that isn’t real national health care, what is? What makes more sense right now than another rise in the already staggering national (in)security budget?

Both parties are complicit in promoting war...
Jimmy explains in less than 10 minutes...Democrats enable the War Machine. Bernie Sanders bill to cut 10% of the War Machine during a pandemic failed because 77 Republican and Democrats are in the pocket of the Military Industrial Complex. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are controlled opposition.

Additionally, Democrats joined Republicans to stop a House bill to bring troops home from Afghanistan. Ilhan Omar introduced the bill that Democrats, the House majority, voted against. Democrats are servants of the War Machine. More from Jimmy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g8WEJXy5ug (8 min)

Let's look at the federal invasion into democratic controlled cities here at home...

As federal agents are deployed to more cities, peace is not the goal.

President Donald Trump’s deployment of Homeland Security agents to U.S. cities seeing a spike in crime is drawing criticism from local leaders who say the federal presence is exacerbating tensions rather than bringing peace.

While the protests have largely been peaceful, Mr. Trump and his allies in conservative media have portrayed the cities as out of control as he tries to contrast himself with Mr. Biden and make the case to voters – especially the suburban women who turned against Republicans in the 2018 midterms – that failing to elect him for a second term will lead to lawlessness.

Critics say the federal forces have stoked tensions, creating new images of violence that could lead frightened viewers to vote for Mr. Trump.

David Lapan, a retired Marine colonel who served as Homeland Security press secretary as well as a public affairs officer for the Defense Department, said he worried about a blurring line between military and law enforcement that "creates the impression the military is being used to suppress the public."

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2020/0722/Are-federal-forces-trained-to-co...

The arrests came this week during clashes with specially equipped federal police agents sent to Portland, where 56 straight days of antiracism demonstrations have captured national attention.

The federal forces have drawn criticism from Democrats and civil liberties groups who allege excessive force and federal overreach by President Donald Trump.

The deployment of federal officers has also drawn the scrutiny of the Justice Department inspector general, who announced an investigation of their use of force, and prompted a federal judge to issue a temporary order limiting their use of force and blocking them from arresting journalists and legal observers of street protests.

The Trump administration sent a tactical team to Seattle on Thursday in anticipation of protests this weekend despite the objections of the Seattle mayor and Washington state governor, who warned of a Portland-like escalation of tensions.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-race-protests/u-s-charges-18-po...

The mayors have asked the federal agents to be withdrawn...

The mayors of 15 large cities warned as much in an open letter to Trump this week. The mayors wrote, they said, “to express our deep concern and objection to the deployment of federal forces in US cities, as those forces are conducting law enforcement activities without coordination or authorization of local law enforcement officials.”

“We urge you to take immediate action to withdraw your forces and agree to no further unilateral deployments in US cities,” the letter said.

Signatories included the mayors of Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Chicago, Washington DC, Kansas City, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, Tucson, Sacramento and Phoenix.

Trump appears intent on setting a new precedent. “We’re not going to let New York and Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and Baltimore, and all of these – Oakland is a mess. More federal law enforcement, that I can tell you,” he said at the White House this week.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/23/us-doj-trump-federal-age...

The empire has come home...

However, our storm troopers and weaponry are engaged around the world as well as at home.

Let's start with our neighbors to the south.
Bolivia isn't often covered. Glenn Greenwald lays out the history of the recent coup in the 1st 15 minutes if you want to hear the big story. He then interviews some folks in the know for those really interested.

Since the coup last October, many of the key claims used to justify the ousting of Morales — most particularly claims by the Organization of American States that the election resulting in Morales’s victory was fraudulent — have been proven to have been lies. Yet not a single one of the foreign policy “experts” or media outlets have acknowledged their errors or even addressed these subsequent revelations, because they know that there are never any consequences for journalists and analysts as long as they remain subservient to the U.S. government agenda (while the New York Times reported on the studies proving the OAS claims to be baseless, they never acknowledged that their own reporting and editorializing treated those claims as true).

Bolivia is but the latest of a long line of thriving, stable democracies destroyed with the support if not the outright participation of the U.S. government, while jingoistic media figures disseminated the propaganda used to justify it all. And the suffering, violence, repression and tyranny left in its wake are then simply ignored by those who helped bring it about.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-in-bolivia-co...

A campaign event demonstrated that when it comes to Venezuela, policies of regime change, sanctions, and refusal to engage in dialogue, Biden and Trump are two sides of the same coin.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/07/09/bidens-venezuela-indistinguishable-tr...

...delegates from over 120 nations offered a crucial endorsement of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and strategized on countering US financial hegemony. “Today in the Middle East and the regions of South America and Latin America, the US is creating instability and insecurity,” Zarif declared to reporters gathered for his arrival. “The resistance of the people of Venezuela against the United States is very important for all the countries of the world.”

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/07/28/we-are-the-vaccine-against-unilateral...

Our assumed ownership of South American countries has a long history...
Since the 1823 declaration of the Monroe Doctrine, the US government has portrayed all of Latin America as its own imperial “backyard.” Among the most enticing prizes for US political leaders and corporate oligarchs over the decades has been Nicaragua.

a speech by President Daniel Ortega, showing how the leftist government has responded to the coronavirus pandemic, and surveying the rising tide of US and corporate media disinformation.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/07/23/nicaragua-sandinista-revolution-41-an...

We have a long history indeed...

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

― Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier

Let's hop across the pond to the Middle East...

Israel trying to start a war while Trump is still in power.
https://news.antiwar.com/2020/07/16/israel-hoping-to-start-a-war-with-ir...

An investigation of supposed Iranian nuclear documents presented in a dramatically staged Netanyahu press conference indicates they were an Israeli fabrication designed to trigger US military conflict with Iran.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/29/fabricated-nuclear-documents-netanyah...

In Israel’s latest wave of escalating attacks in Syria, the former seems to have targeted a major Iranian-backed ammunition depot on the edge of Damascus on Monday. However, Iran’s response to regional developments and the US maximum pressure campaign has been to bide its time, rather than retaliate or escalate and changing that strategy at this time seems unlikely. Further, there may be an opportunity to push Iran to compromise or pull back some from its regional endeavors before the upcoming elections in the US.
...
Iran has been hit hard as pressure mounts on Iran and its proxies across the region, mainly in Iraq and Lebanon. But the most significant development is inside Iran, with a number of mysterious explosions and fires across the country, including within Iran’s missile production and nuclear facilities. While no one has confirmed that Israel was responsible, it seems likely they were behind the attacks.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2020/07/24/Israe...

Syria is another failed US coup. Like a spoiled child we levy crippling sanctions against this small country which defied US control.

Like the mysterious figure it is named for, the Caesar sanctions bill is the product of an elaborate deception by shadowy US- and Gulf-backed operatives. Instead of protecting Syrian civilians, the unilateral measures are driving them towards hunger and death.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/25/us-qatari-intelligence-deception-prod...

Economic sanctions are the siege strategy of neofeudalism.

And we can't forget the evil Russia boogieman

A long-awaited UK report finds no evidence of Russian meddling, but that hasn’t stopped the fear-mongering. The report claims the UK government didn’t find evidence because it didn’t look for it, and backs increased powers for intelligence agencies and media censorship as a result. Afshin Rattansi, a British journalist and host of RT’s Going Underground, responds with Aaron Mate

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/07/25/uk-russia-report-fear-mongers-about-m...

I appreciated the description of the CIA playbook. The CIA 'leaks' information/propaganda to the press. It is printed. Now TPTB use the article as proof saying that credible news sources have reported...

Bountygate

The New York Times dropped another Russiagate bombshell on June 26 with a sensational front-page story headlined, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.” A predictable media and political frenzy followed, reviving the anti-Russian hysteria that has excited the Beltway establishment for the past four years.

But a closer look at the reporting by the Times and other mainstream outlets vying to confirm its coverage reveals another scandal not unlike Russiagate itself: the core elements of the story appear to have been fabricated by Afghan government intelligence to derail a potential US troop withdrawal from the country. And they were leaked to the Times and other outlets by US national security state officials who shared an agenda with their Afghan allies.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/07/07/pentagon-afghan-bountygate-us-intelli...

And the accusations just don't stop...

The Pentagon has issued a new round of allegations against Russia claiming they are providing weapons and even warplanes to Gen. Khalifa Hafter’s rebel forces in Libya. They say satellite images show the transfers in the city of Sirte.

https://news.antiwar.com/2020/07/24/us-accuses-russia-of-arming-libyan-r...

“Get out now, or risk the consequences,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared last week to companies facilitating the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The project to build a second set of pipes under the Baltic Sea from Russia directly to Germany has been delayed by U.S. sanctions, but it is on track to be finished in the coming months. Now, the United States is threatening new sanctions in a last-ditch effort to impede the pipeline’s construction. “Companies aiding and abetting Russia’s malign-influence projects,” Pompeo insisted, “will not be tolerated.”

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/20/nord-stream-2-pompeo-sanctions-russ...

But now (thanks to obummer's pivot) the big threat is ...
China

The U.S. policy of engagement with China began 50 years ago. Today, the Trump administration is driving the nail into its coffin. In a series of scorching anti-China speeches by top U.S. cabinet members and via the closure of the Chinese Consulate in Houston amid espionage charges, Washington made it clear that relations are long overdue for a wholesale makeover. In an important speech on Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested that engagement with China, the work of then-President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, may have been well intentioned, but naive.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/24/document-of-the-week-pompeo-buries-...

In a speech on Thursday full of lies, hypocrisy and anti-communist demagogy, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo officially overturned decades of American policy toward China, setting the stage for a further escalation of Washington’s confrontation with Beijing.
...
Pompeo declared that “if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China” had to be replaced by a strategy whereby “the free world must triumph over this new tyranny.” He continued, “We must induce China to change in more creative and assertive ways, because Beijing’s actions threaten our people and our prosperity.”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/25/lead-j25.html

Following near daily screeds against China, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is now laying out US hostility, and the goal of “changing” China as part of what is effectively a new Cold War, likening it to Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Saying that the US had changed Soviet behavior, Pompeo expressed confidence that they could change China as well, saying that the nations of the world have a duty to help the US “defend freedom.” He also warned that “our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Communist party.”

https://news.antiwar.com/2020/07/24/pompeo-lays-out-new-us-cold-war-agai...

Forget Putin, it's meddling by America's evangelical enforcer that should scare us. Secretary of state Mike Pompeo has a track record of pursuing the worst impulses of the US political right.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/26/forget-putin-its-m...

The same propaganda game is employed against China.

Claims that China has detained millions of Uyghur Muslims are based largely on two studies. A closer look at these papers reveals US government backing, absurdly shoddy methodologies, and a rapture-ready evangelical researcher named Adrian Zenz.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-uyghurs-prob...

U.S. - China Spat Over Quarantine And Consulates Continues
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/07/us-china-spat-over-quarantine-and-...

Meanwhile US, Australian, Japanese and UK war ships gather in the S. China Sea.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12119147/us-aircraft-carriers-south-china-...

US aircraft carriers have sailed through the South China Sea as Washington accused Beijing of a "campaign of bullying" in the disputed region.

Who is the bully here? Imagine if China sent carriers into the Gulf of Mexico.

So instead of investing in the people in the US (and around the world) we provoke and agitate. COVID continues in the US, but we attack our own citizens in a multitude of ways. The economy is a joke.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on July 23 that the Republicans oppose extending the enhanced unemployment insurance in its current form. “Because were not going to pay people more money to stay at home than work,” he said.

Last week 2.3 million workers applied for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. This is the 18th week in a row that unemployment claims have been more than twice the worst week of the Great Recession.

https://financemarkethouse.com/2020/07/26/joblessness-remains-at-histori...

I want to close with a commentary this week from Noam Chomsky...

Trump Is Using Pandemic to Enrich Billionaires as Millions Lose Work & Face Eviction

NOAM CHOMSKY: What you’re describing is—the country is in kind of a parody of the way it usually runs. It is a country run essentially by the corporate sector, which has overwhelming influence on the government and which describes quite correct—it is kind of symbolized by the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, who made $13 billion in a single day. They’re just running wild, using Trump and the administration or using the cover of the pandemic to increase their dedication to enriching the very rich and the corporate sector who are, of course, eating it up. They love it.

I mentioned military industry. That is another example of it. You might regard it as a last-ditch effort to try to impose the maximal rule of extreme wealth and corporate power running parallel to the Mitch McConnell-Trump campaign to pack the judiciary top to bottom with young ultra-right Federalist Society lawyers who will be able to make sure that no matter what the public wants, nothing but their ultra-reactionary policies will ever be able to be implemented for at least a generation.

They are running on all stops to try to maintain what they have succeeded in largely getting through the neoliberal period, the last 40 years, an enormous concentration of wealth, concentration of political power, general population stagnating, declining, even to the point where there is an increase in mortality in the last few years among working age people, white working age men and women, mostly men, some women. Nothing like this happens in functioning developed societies.

The Republicans know very well that they are a minority party. Trump, in fact, pointed out not long ago that if there were fair elections, the Republicans would never win political office. The country, basically, for a long time, has been pretty much a one-party state, the business party. Two factions. They have changed over time.

The last several decades pretty much since Gingrich, and extensively since McConnell, the Republicans have just gone off the spectrum, off the political spectrum. If you look at international rankings, they’re alongside the European parties with neofascist backgrounds. Political analysts, serious political analysts, describe them as a radical insurgency that has abandoned parliamentary politics. We talked a couple of days ago with Greg Palast, whose very interesting work has shown the extent to which they’re desperately trying to purge electoral lists to prevent the wrong people from voting so somehow they can hang on.

All of this is happening in parallel along with what you describe, the massive enrichment of the superrich and the corporate sector under the cover of the pandemic. Every couple of days, some other executive decision or decision of one of the corporate clones, the corporate figures Trump placed in charge of the various agencies like the EPA, passing further legislation to smash the public in the face and enrich the rich, like cutting back pollution standards, which, of course, is great for the coal companies. They are hanging on by a thread, but we can keep them going longer to cause maximal destruction to organized human society. Also the pollution which right in the middle of a respiratory pandemic, increasing pollution, of course, maximizes deaths.

And it is selective. It is the people who live near the polluting factories. Who are they? The people who can’t afford to live anywhere else. You don’t see Goldman Sachs executives living there. What you see is poor, black, Hispanic, Puerto Ricans. They are the ones who will take the brunt of it. They are already suffering much worse from the pandemic. This will make it worse.

It is kind of similar to what you see in Brazil where Bolsonaro is quite happy to see—the indigenous populations of the Amazonian region are facing literal genocide, first from destruction of the forest, now from the pandemic. Many of them live hundreds of miles from the nearest [inaudible] station. Illegal loggers come in and spread the pandemic; they die. Do you think Bolsonaro minds? He thinks they ought to be eliminated. He said so. “We don’t need those people, so let’s get rid of them altogether.” So let’s get rid of the people living near the polluting industries. Who needs them? They vote the wrong way, anyway. They’re the wrong color.

This is something happening in the world under the U.S. aegis, which is literally unparalleled in modern history, again with the single exception of the true fascist states in developed society. There are no other words to describe it.

Take care and be well as we watch the disaster unfold.