Why Constant War?

Why is the United Stated constantly engaged in war? Jeffrey Sachs answered this question in a discussion with Glenn Greenwald:

The fundamental problem is that American foreign policy is against the interests of the American people, and therefore it is based on continuous lying. This is not new to Ukraine or to Gaza. Of course, it was part of the Iraq War. It was part of Syria. How many Americans understand that Obama ordered the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government? Almost not discussed. U.S. foreign policy is based on the idea that the U.S. should be the world's hegemonic power, the unchallenged, unrivaled power in every region of the world: full-spectrum dominance, meaning economic, military, technological, diplomatic, and financial dominance in every part of the world. It's completely delusional. It's delusional. Well, maybe there was a brief period after World War II when the U.S. stood dominant because the U.S. hadn't been destroyed militarily. Maybe there was a moment, and there was, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the U.S., in a way, was unrivaled. But life is a little bit more complicated than the United States holding all the pieces in the world. Since we don't, trying to do so means nonstop wars. And if it was explained to the American people, “Hey, Americans, how do you feel about nonstop wars so that the U.S. can be the unchallenged power of the whole world?” People would say, “Are you crazy? Leave me alone. I gotta go back to work. I'm trying to raise my kids. You stop sending us so many threats, taxes, trillions of military spending, and so on. They never buy this stuff.

And so, the whole thing is based on lies. We have to go into Iraq. We know it's not us in Syria, it's the Russians in Syria. It's not us in Ukraine, it's Putin, unprovoked, and on and on. It's such sad nonsense. But since it's based on lies, it has to be secret. Also, it cannot be that there's open discourse. You cannot allow open discourse when the lying is so relentless. And so, it comes naturally that if you want to do something that is not possible, that is delusional and is not what the public wants, and you have at least a formal structure of democracy that we have elections and so forth and there's supposed to be some voice of the people, then you have to lie, and when you have to lie, then everything has to be confidential. Then the worst crime in America, as you know very well because you reported on it more than anyone else in our country, is that you have to make the greatest criminal, the one who tells the truth, or the one who leaks the truth, or the one who exposes the lie, and that becomes the modus operandi of the Imperial State. So, to my mind, the whole thing starts with the wrong premise, which is that the only way the United States can be safe in the world is to run the world, which is both impossible extraordinarily costly, and extraordinarily threatening to our survival.

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Dave Smith Offers and A/B Illustration of How Corporate Media-Concocted Narratives Masquerade as Facts

A protest is a protest, right? No, not when an election is looming. Corporate media (including NPR) specializes in telling us just enough of the right kind of facts to get the right person elected. Dave Smith offers this excellent illustration comparing the George Floyd protests to the current protests regarding the war involving Israel and Gaza.

The text of Dave's tweet:

Four years ago, after George Floyd’s death, a massive protest movement started across the country. The protests quickly turned violent. Almost nightly, in cities across the country, riots broke out. Many people were murdered, thousands were assaulted and billions of dollars in property damage was committed.

In the face of this, the corporate media sided with the rioters. They stood in front of fires calling the riots “mostly peaceful”

Our cartoonishly militarized police, seeming to finally have a purpose for existing, stood down and allowed the mob to terrorize American citizens.

Objectively, the current “free Palestine” protests are nothing like this. They actually have been “mostly peaceful.” There have been isolated instances of violence and a few made up hoaxes.

Watching the media coverage and police response has been sickening, particularly when you remember 2020.

The bottom line is that they thought those protests hurt Trump and these ones hurt Biden.

There are a lot of things I don’t like about these protests but the major issues come down to the words they’re hollering or blocking college kids from a building. It’s important to remember the real story here isn’t some left wing 20 yr olds. It’s what Israel is doing to Gaza and our criminal government funding and arming it.

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The United States Empire as a Configuration of Dots

As Jimmy Dore points out, each dot is a United States Military base, part of our Department of DEFENSE.

This is called Empire. This is imperialism. These are all the military bases the United States has around the world. You know, no other country has this just the United States as this. Nobody else does this. China, Russia. They don't have bases all over the world. Who does? We do, because that's how capitalism ends up.

You have to use a gun to keep it going. And you have to become fascists, which is what Joe Biden did to the railroad workers when he crushed her railroad strike. That's called fascism. The stuff that they that you hear all the time and on TV as fascism isn't. That was actual fascism. And this is why our country is going down the shitter and we're ending like all great empires. And we're overextending militarily while we won't take care of our own people at home.

We just said $15 billion, which could take care of everybody here in the United States. We just send it to Ukraine with no debate, no talking about it. And we're we just built another military base in Syria. We built three more in the Philippines just in the last couple of months. That's where your money's going. Because your government is 100% corrupt. Not regular corrupt. It's 100%. corrupt. This is called corruption. You see this? Do you know what this is called? This is called a trillion dollars a year in corruption because that's all this is. These military bases are there to make sure American corporations can extract natural resources from these places. Look at all the bases we have outside of China. Look at this. Here comes South America, Central America. Look at that! Imagine if China had these many bases in South and Central America or anywhere? Imagine if China had all these bases in the Middle East Imagine.

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Jimmy Dore Offers a Real Version of the News

Jimmy Dore:

I have friends who still think the TV news is there to inform them & give them “news”. Americans are the most propagandized people on earth & they have no idea they are.

If the TV new actually did inform people about what is going on in the world & who actually runs things it would cause a revolution, which is why they never tell you the truth about anything important.

Their job is to manufacture consent for the agenda of Oligarchy & the handful of Billionaires who actually run things.

They’ve pushed EVERY war in my lifetime. EVERY WAR.

Can you imagine Anderson Cooper coming on TV and saying:

“The government is lying to you about this war, it’s complete bullshit just like Iraq & Vietnam, it’s built on lies to enrich a handful of people at the expense of everyone else, this is about money & power & stealing natural resources for western corporations & everyone should immediately oppose it”.

And STILL people turn to them for news & information as if they’ve turned over a new leaf & rejected their funding from weapons manufacturers, Wall st. & Oil companies.

We are living in a world that is a mixture of Orwell’s “1984” & Huxely’s “Brave New World” & it’s amazing how perfectly comfortable people are with that.

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Someone Please Explain These Developments on FISA and the Non-Stop Funding of Wars

Matt Taibbi is flummoxed. So am I. Any curious person would be. Matt tries to explain what happened in he recent article: "A Saturday Massacre in CongressOn a Saturday to mark and remember, congress funds two wars and hands the intelligence agencies sweeping new surveillance power, getting nothing in return."

Please. Someone tell me who is moving the levers of power in DC and how?  Matt Taibbi offers this:

Mike Johnson is now Winston Churchill. All he had to do was give the NSA unlimited spying power, overrule constituents about funding two wars, and support allowing government to block a platform used by 60 million Americans.

In return he got: nothing. No immigration reform, no articulation of benchmarks or a plan for success in Ukraine, no accounting for past spending, no insistence on warrants to spy on Americans, no concession that FISA can only be reauthorized by Congress, no claw-back of a major new “Everybody is a Spy” surveillance ask. Johnson traded his starting lineup for the proverbial bag of balls.

History will look back at a moment below from April 12th, just before the House passed FISA, and wonder about a last comment from Johnson. The Speaker talks about being originally horrified by the “terrible abuses, hundreds of thousands of abuses” of FISA by the FBI.

But “then when I became Speaker, I went to the [secure briefing room] and got a confidential briefing” from intelligence officials, and heard “sort of the other perspective on that.” It “gave him a different perspective.”

Regarding FISA, Reason explains what was at stake in an article titled "Revised Section 702 Surveillance Authority Poses More Danger Than EverNew language could make almost anybody with access to a WiFi router help the government snoop."
If this became law, millions of American small business owners would have a legal obligation to hand over data that runs through their equipment," caution former Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R–Va.) and former Sen. Mark Udall (D–Colo.), both now with the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability. "And when they're done with doing their part in mass surveillance, these small businesses would then be placed under a gag order to hide their activities from their customers."

It seems like Glenn Greenwald is thinking more bad things are happening than he is willing to articulate at this time. Consider this part of Glenn's monologue: [More . . . ]

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