Robert Malone’s Concerns About Imminent American Collapse

Robert Malone:

As I consider the evidence, I think we are observing more than just the mundane banality of evil. I think we are observing the consequences of the last gasps of Imperial Pax Americana play out in real time before our eyes. American imperialism is quite literally running out of gas, teetering on the edge, awaiting some push (from BRICS? From the CCP?) over the knife’s edge towards dollar-based fiat currency collapse and imperial decline such as the British empire saw during the 20th century.

Here is the thesis. The rise and fall of empires is not driven by failures of leaders, or the madness (or senility) of presidents, kings and emperors. The longevity and durability of empires are self limited by the accumulated weight and inefficiency of their own bureaucracies. And, in turn, these bureaucracies are the consequence of a million tiny cuts, each rationalized as being in the best interests of the empire and its citizens. The United States is dying under the weight of the administrative state, abetted by a lazy and corrupt two party political system which cares more for the preservation of its own privilege than for the Constitution and Nation-state that it ostensibly serves.

Continue ReadingRobert Malone’s Concerns About Imminent American Collapse

After Seymour Hersh Revealed Joe Biden’s Lawless Destruction of the Nord Stream Pipeline, Congress has been Silent. Dennis Kucinich has Spoken Up.

Ever since Seymour Hersh revealed that Joe Biden instructed U.S. military to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline, no sitting member of Congress has spoken up, protested, or called for a hearing. All members of Congress have thus ratified Joe Biden's dangerous lawlessness.

At the recent Rage Against the War Machine Rally, former member of Congress, Dennis Kucinich, was not silent:

In blowing up the Nordstrom pipeline, this government has deliberately circumvented Article One of the U.S. Constitution: the authority of Congress to make war. It has violated international criminal law by conspiring to commit acts of sabotage and violence on the high seas. It has used illegal and unconstitutional means to destroy the energy resources needed to protect millions of people in Europe during the winter and then to profit from its illegal actions by selling energy to Europe at a four to six times markup. It has done so blatantly and cynically, simultaneously taking credit for the destruction of the Nordstrom Pipeline and then denying any role in it.

I speak directly to those responsible thanks to a courageous journalist, Seymour Hersh. We know what each of you did at the Nord Stream pipeline, Mr. President, Mr. Secretary of State, Mr. National Security advisor and Madam Under-Secretary of State, and we will not rest until you are held accountable by Congress, by the international criminal court and by the American people at the next election for your reprehensible conduct, which has debased our Constitution, undermined the rule of law in our name, committed an act of War which threatens the Peace of the world and the stability of our own Nation. No amount of balloon militarism will distract us from your profoundly lawless and reckless conduct.

Continue ReadingAfter Seymour Hersh Revealed Joe Biden’s Lawless Destruction of the Nord Stream Pipeline, Congress has been Silent. Dennis Kucinich has Spoken Up.

Seymour Hersh Blows Up Joe Biden’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline Story

Here's a short chronology, then my reaction:

Feb 7, 2022: Joe Biden promises that Russia invades Ukraine, the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline will not be operational: "We will bring an end to it."

Sept 26, 2022 - The Nordstream 2 pipeline is destroyed.

Sept 28, 2022 - The Washington Post scolds Tucker Carlson for reporting that the U.S. destroyed Russia's pipeline.

Sept 30, 2022 - The White house denies U.S. involvement in destroying the pipeline. Accuses the Russians of lying. Claims that Russia destroyed its own pipeline.

Feb 8, 2023 - Highly respected investigative reporter Seymore Hersh issues news article detailing how the U.S. blew up the Nordstream 2 Pipeline. Title: "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline: The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now."

Feb 8, 2023 - The White House claims that the article by Hersch, a well-decorated reporter (see comments), is "utterly false and complete fiction."

In a surreal way, it has ceased to become "news" that our political leaders constantly lie to us, even on matters that could dramatically escalate (already high) tensions between the U.S. and Russia, two irresponsible trigger-happy countries, each of which is capable of ruining the entire planet with their over-abundance of nuclear weapons.

You and were not give an opportunity to vote on whether the U.S should engage in such reckless behavior. Congress did not deliberate on whether the U.S. should jump into a proxy war with Russia. You and I were not asked whether the U.S. should destroy a valuable asset of Russia, committing what Russia will undoubtedly consider an act of war.

Witness yet another short-term victory for the Military-Petroleum-Industrial-Complex. We are playing out yet another round of wars of discretion. This should be horrifying to all of us. Why? Here are the ending lines of Hersch's article:

The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”

Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.

“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.

“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”

At this time, based on my own search of these five websites, not a single word about Hersh's Nordstream 2 reporting at NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC or NPR. The only recent thing I found on MSNBC was this glowing interview of Hersh by David Gura.

Nathan Robinson:

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Chris Hedges Describes our Self-Destructive Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine

Chris Hedges describes the dire situation. At the end of this passage he ties in the poison of Russiagate, as exposed by the Twitter Files and the recent reporting of Matt Taibbi:

The near hysterical calls to support Ukraine as a bulwark of liberty and democracy by the mandarins in Washington are a response to the palpable rot and decline of the U.S. empire. America’s global authority has been decimated by well-publicized war crimes, torture, economic decline, social disintegration — including the assault on the capital on January 6, the botched response to the pandemic, declining life expectancies and the plague of mass shootings — and a series of military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States around the globe since the end of World War II have never resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. Instead, these interventions have led to over 20 million killed and spawned a global revulsion for U.S. imperialism.

In desperation, the empire pumps ever greater sums into its war machine. The most recent $1.7 trillion spending bill included $847 billion for the military; the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction, such as the Department of Energy, which oversees nuclear weapons maintenance and the infrastructure that develops them. In 2021, when the U.S. had a military budget of $801 billion, it constituted nearly 40 percent of all global military expenditures, more than the next nine countries, including Russia and China, spent on their militaries combined.

As Edward Gibbon observed about the Roman Empire’s own fatal lust for endless war: “[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”

A state of permanent war creates complex bureaucracies, sustained by compliant politicians, journalists, scientists, technocrats and academics, who obsequiously serve the war machine. This militarism needs mortal enemies — the latest are Russia and China — even when those demonized have no intention or capability, as was the case with Iraq, of harming the U.S. We are hostage to these incestuous institutional structures.

Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, for example, appointed eight commissioners to review Biden’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) to “examine the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS.” The commission, as Eli Clifton writes at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is “largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.” The chair of the commission, Clifton notes, is former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who “sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.”

Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposes as an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy. The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.

Continue ReadingChris Hedges Describes our Self-Destructive Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine

David Talbot’s Deep-Dive into the Corruption of the CIA

I'm reading The Devil's Chessboard, David Talbot's 2015 page-turner about Alan Dulles and the CIA. Excerpts:

In the view of the Dulles brothers, democracy was an enterprise that had to be carefully managed by the right men, not simply left to elected officials as a public trust....

[W]hen Allen Dulles served as the United States’ top spy in continental Europe during World War II, he blatantly ignored Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender and pursued his own strategy of secret negotiations with Nazi leaders....

Allen Dulles outmaneuvered and outlived Franklin Roosevelt. He stunned Harry Truman, who signed the CIA into existence in 1947, by turning the agency into a Cold War colossus far more powerful and lethal than anything Truman had imagined. Eisenhower gave Dulles immense license to fight the administration’s shadow war against Communism, but at the end of his presidency, Ike concluded that Dulles had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left him nothing but “a legacy of ashes.” Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served in high office....

Dulles would serve John F. Kennedy for less than a year, but their briefly entwined stories would have monumental consequences. Clearly outmatched in the beginning by the savvy spymaster, who beguiled Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs disaster, JFK proved a quick learner in the Washington power games. He became the first and only president who dared to strip Dulles of his formidable authority. But Dulles’s forced retirement did not last long after Kennedy jettisoned him from the CIA in November 1961. Instead of easing into his twilight years, Dulles continued to operate as if he were still America’s intelligence chief, targeting the president who had ended his illustrious career. The underground struggle between these two icons of power is nothing less than the story of the battle for American democracy....

Continue ReadingDavid Talbot’s Deep-Dive into the Corruption of the CIA