Demented, arrogant, and ignorant western leaders are out of their depth and in over their heads. They are embroiled in so many conflicts they don't know if they're coming or going. Like Brer Rabbit's encounter with the tar baby we are entrapped in a morass of multiple wars of our own making. The empire's collapse looms large.
Narratives, cheers, jeers, opinions, detractors; or: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Now you may not believe that it was a Big Deal, but you may want to finish this lunker in order to see that it was. Now I’m not sure that Markos Moulitsas had weighed in on it, but…. (just kidding). First up:
G-20: Russia, Iran and the Bid to End US Unilateralism’ June 30, 2019, Salman Rafi Sheik
Kropotkin’s quotation puts me in mind of a purported Q and A with Mahatma Gandhi:
Q: ‘What do you think about Western civilization?’
A: ‘I think it would be a very good idea.’
But imagine that you’re in the Twilight Zone, or in a parallel universe, watching as the fading Western Empire goes full-tilt loose cannon and attempts to exert full command-and-control of the planet. A refusal to cede to the inevitability of a multi-polar world in power and influence, trade, including ridiculous nationalistic levels of imposed tariffs, killing sanctions, wars in 40% of the nations on the globe (Africom and re-purposed cold war 2.0 NATO), cyber-space, and more.
When the balance of power shifts in the world, you expect it to be a Big Thing. Am I right? Bombs bursting in air? But turning points are often very subtle. And this one happened just now.
It’s “time to say goodbye” to the United States, said Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte on a visit to China, where he and President Xi Jinping are turning the recently-frosty tide with bilateral agreements, while Washington now gets the cold shoulder.
I am not sure if I should go back to bed and bury myself under many covers.
The Cooperative Global Strategy to marginalize US influence in the world has been in place since, at least, 2003 — following the criminally spurious US attack on Iraq, which killed more than a million innocent civilians and destabilized the entire Middle East.
Most likely, the Strategy to marginalize the US first came into existence in the late 1990s, after the "Project for a New American Century" Neocon manifesto — America's Mein Kampf — was published. I first became aware of the strategy in 2005, working the FOREX trading desk during the Asian and London markets. It was there that I fully understood the extraordinary privilege that a nation has when its currency is the Reserve Currency for world trade. I saw how that privilege could be used and abused to bully the rest of the world both economically and militarily. (Don't even get me started on what the NSA did to the psyche of the world, which thoroughly ended any future the US might have as a global power.)
