Basic Facts About USAID

Today I post this on FB, where am constantly smacked like a pinata by people who are completely ignorant about how U.S. foreign policy works.

If you are not following key people on Twitter, you are living in abject ignorance. You are missing real facts and real conversation. You are inviting corporate media to take over your brain so that you think and mouth corporate propaganda. You might hate what I've written above because you think of yourself as intelligent, but intelligence depends on being well informed by people who speak freely, without censorship. You are not getting that with corporate media. It's time to break out and learn important things that the giant U.S. propaganda machine is hiding from you. Case in point: USAID. You probably know nothing about USAID. You are probably completely ignorant about the damage we have done to dozens of other countries through USAID. We do this in the name of democracy, but that is complete bullshit. Mike Benz explains.

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The War Narrative Concocted and Perfected by the United States

Jeffrey Sachs explains that we are being subjected to a war narrative, not meaningful discussions of the kinds of facts that nations should consider before deciding to engage in a war, especially a war of discretion:

The war in Syria. And you may actually hear from grown up reporters who are lying through their teeth or ignorant beyond imagining that, oh, the war in Syria? Yes, Russia intervened in Syria. Well, do you know that the Obama tasked the CIA to overthrow the Syrian Government, starting four years before Russia intervened? What kind of nonsense is that? And how many times did the New York Times report on Operation Timber Sycamore, which was the presidential order to the CIA to overthrow Bashar Al Assad? Three times in 10 years. This is not democracy. This is a game. And it's a game of narrative.

Why did the US invade Iraq in 2003 Well, first of all, it was completely phony pretenses. It wasn't, "Oh, we were so wrong. They didn't have weapons of mass destruction." They actually did focus groups in the fall of 2002 to find out what would sell that war to the American people. Abe Schulsky, the if you want to know the name of the PR genius. They did focus groups on the war. They wanted the war all the time. They had to figure out how to sell the war to the American people, how to scare the shit out of the American people. It was a phony war.

Where did that war come from? You know what? It's quite surprising that war came from Netanyahu, actually. You know that? It's weird, and the way it is, is that Netanyahu had, from 1995 onward, the theory that the only way we're going to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah is by toppling the governments that support them. That's Iraq, Syria and Iran. And the guy's nothing if not obsessive, and he's still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week. He's a deep, dark son of a bitch. Sorry to tell you, because he's gotten us into endless wars, and because of the power of all of this in the US politics, he's gotten his way, but that war was totally phony. So what is this? Democracy versus dictatorship? Come on. This is these are not even sensible terms.

And consider this conversation offered 20 years ago by Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark:

About 10 days after 911 I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs, just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used used to work for me and one of the generals called me and he said, "Sir, you got to come in. You got to come in and talk to me a second." I said, "Well, you're too busy." He said, "No. Said, no, no. He says, we've made the decision. We're going to war with Iraq." This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, "We're going to war with Iraq. Why?"

He said, "I don't know." He said, "I guess they don't know what else to do?"

So I said, "Well, did they find some information collect connecting Saddam to al Qaeda?" And he said, "No, no." He says, "There's nothing new that way, they just made the decision to go to war with Iraq." He said, "I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments." And he said, "I guess if the only two you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail."

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it's worse than that." He said. He reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper. He said, "I just, he said, I just got this down from upstairs," meaning the Secretary of Defense Office today. And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran."

George Carlin often discussed the power of words. I would propose that we re-re-name the Pentagon as the "War Department." In modern times, it rarely performs the function of a "Defense Department."

Carlin had it right so incredibly often:

What kind of wars do we typically fight? Carlin explained:

He goes on to describe that the U.S. government is especially fond of waging war against countries populated by brown people. He explains that bombing people is a good thing to be good at if you don’t have any other national talents.

Can’t build a decent car, can’t make a TV set or a VCR worth a fuck, got no steel industry left, can’t educate our young people, can’t get health care to our old people, but we can bomb the shit out of your country all right! Huh? Especially if your country is full of brown people—oh we like that don’t we? That’s our hobby! That’s our new job in the world: bombing brown people. Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya, you got some brown people in your country, tell them to watch the fuck out or we’ll goddamn bomb them!

One last thing: How to quickly turn a terrorist group into a group of fighter that are loyal to the cause:

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Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn Discuss Ukraine, Censorship and Insanity

Fascinating discussion about Ukraine, censorship and the insanity of the neocons (of the U.S. and western Europe). Here's an excerpt from a much longer conversation titled "Gambling with Nukes" by Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi 0:16

There's a gamble implicit in it. You are firing missiles at a nuclear power and you are gambling that they are not going to fire them back, right? And there was, there were actually quotes from American officials talking about how, you know the real irresponsible people were the Russians. They were the ones you know, who were being irresponsible. Let's see what was the quote? The EU foreign policy chief Joseph Burrell said it's not the first time that Putin plays the nuclear gamble, okay? And this was before the launch of the British missiles, and after the launch of the of the ATACMS missiles. And then, and then this guy, [British Prime Minister, [Keir] Starmer, who comes out, and he looks like a cross of Max Headroom and Noel Coward. I mean, like, I can't even that the whole presentation is so disturbing. This like kind of blinking creature who speaks in that bizarre accent, just repeating catch phrases over and over again while he talks about firing missiles at Russia. It just seems crazy, right? And then that is succeeded by new news that came out that, apparently, the French are going to be next, and they're going to, they're going to be sending something called SCALP missiles into Russia. And, you know, then we get the ICBM fired back. Walter Kirn 1:59 Well, they're, they're all they're all making themselves targets, aren't they? I mean, they're lining up. Should there be any doubt about the legitimacy? Who cares about legitimacy? Who cares about all the rules anymore these? Who cares about the norms? Dude, they just broke the biggest norm in history, which was to send our missiles into a nuclear state to land and explode. That's the biggest norm in American or world history, since those kind of things were invented, frankly, so the rules based international order--that's out the window. Norms are out the window, not shooting missiles into the home territory of the greatest nuclear power next to the United States is out the window. All of this being led by a lame duck American president who is all week in South America, while his vice president, who just ran for president, is vacationing in Hawaii. Well, Aloha. The whole mask is off.

The thing that scares me is how these people ever expect that they and their party will be taken seriously for five seconds should they ever try to float a peace message or a humanitarian message. Again, the party of social justice, and in England, the left wing party, the Labor Party, to which Starmer belongs, are at a moment when we have actually, in the United States, the center, the crown, of this power structure, voted out our executive It is beyond insane, and it will not end well. Matt, just as I was upset on Monday, I can tell you that next week we will be even more upset. Things are going to happen, and things are already happening every day, when this missile went off this morning. Every power in the world that has modern warning systems had an alarm go off right for the first moments after its launch. The United States had to assume that it was under nuclear attack.

[MORE . . .]

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Biden Advocates for Impeaching Biden

Joe Biden in 2007: "I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee for 17 years, as a ranking member. I teach separation of powers and constitutes law. This is something I know. So I got together and brought a group of constitutional scholars together to write a piece that I'm going to deliver to the whole United States Senate, pointing out the President has no constitutional authority to take this nation to war against the country of 70 million people, unless we're attacked or unless there is proof that we are about to be attacked. And if he does, if he does, I would move to impeach him. The house obviously has to do that, but I would lead an effort to impeach him. The reason for my doing--and I don't say it lightly. I don't say it lightly. I say it because they should understand that what they were threatening, what they were saying, what was adding up to be, what looked like to the rest of the world what we're about to do would be the most disastrous thing that could be done at this moment in our history that I can think of."

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Why the U.S. Has Ukrainian Blood on its Hands: Jeffrey Sachs Offers this Primer

So many people I know proudly ignore the indisputable history of US meddling in Ukraine. Because they are ignorant, they deny that the US is responsible for the needless deaths of 600,000 Ukrainians and 70,000 Russians (and the squandering of the U.S. treasury). The Neocons in the Biden-Harris cabinet (including Biden and Harris) have blood on their hands, but you wouldn't know it because the corporate media has been covering it up and lying to you. The history of Ukraine did not begin in 2022. Please consider listening to Jeffrey Sachs for 10 minutes. These facts are not disputed by anyone who has been paying attention.

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