- This Might Be Where The Very First Total Nuclear War Starts
This article by Dilip Hiro originally appeared at War is Boring in 2016.
Undoubtedly, for nearly two decades the most dangerous place on Earth has been the Indian-Pakistani border in Kashmir. It’s possible that a small spark from artillery and rocket exchanges across that border might – given the known military doctrines of the two nuclear-armed neighbors – lead inexorably to an all-out nuclear conflagration. In that case the result would be catastrophic. Besides causing the deaths of millions of Indians and Pakistanis, such a war might bring on “nuclear winter” on a planetary scale, leading to levels of suffering and death that would be beyond our comprehension.
Alarmingly, the nuclear competition between India and Pakistan has now entered a spine-chilling phase. That danger stems from Islamabad’s decision to deploy low-yield tactical nuclear arms at its forward operating military bases along its entire frontier with India to deter possible aggression by tank-led invading forces. Most ominously, the decision to fire such a nuclear-armed missile with a range of 35 to 60 miles is to rest with local commanders. This is a perilous departure from the universal practice of investing such authority in the highest official of the nation. Such a situation has no parallel in the Washington-Moscow nuclear arms race of the Cold War era.
When it comes to Pakistan’s strategic nuclear weapons, their parts are stored in different locations to be assembled only upon an order from the country’s leader. By contrast, tactical nukes are pre-assembled at a nuclear facility and shipped to a forward base for instant use. In addition to the perils inherent in this policy, such weapons would be vulnerable to misuse by a rogue base commander or theft by one of the many militant groups in the country.
In the nuclear standoff between the two neighbors, the stakes are constantly rising as Aizaz Chaudhry, the highest bureaucrat in Pakistan’s foreign ministry, recently made clear. The deployment of tactical nukes, he explained, was meant to act as a form of “deterrence,” given India’s “Cold Start” military doctrine — a reputed contingency plan aimed at punishing Pakistan in a major way for any unacceptable provocations like a mass-casualty terrorist strike against India.
New Delhi refuses to acknowledge the existence of Cold Start. Its denials are hollow. As early as 2004, it was discussing this doctrine, which involved the formation of eight division-size Integrated Battle Groups. These were to consist of infantry, artillery, armor and air support, and each would be able to operate independently on the battlefield. In the case of major terrorist attacks by any Pakistan-based group, these IBGs would evidently respond by rapidly penetrating Pakistani territory at unexpected points along the border and advancing no more than 30 miles inland, disrupting military command and control networks while endeavoring to stay away from locations likely to trigger nuclear retaliation.
In other words, India has long been planning to respond to major terror attacks with a swift and devastating conventional military action that would inflict only limited damage and so — in a best-case scenario — deny Pakistan justification for a nuclear response.
Islamabad, in turn, has been planning ways to deter the Indians from implementing a Cold-Start-style blitzkrieg on its territory. After much internal debate, its top officials opted for tactical nukes. In 2011, the Pakistanis tested one successfully. Since then, according to Rajesh Rajagopalan, the New Delhi-based co-author of Nuclear South Asia: Keywords and Concepts, Pakistan seems to have been assembling four to five of these annually.
All of this has been happening in the context of populations that view each other unfavorably. A typical survey in this period by the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Pakistanis had an unfavorable view of India, with 57 percent considering it as a serious threat, while on the other side 59 percent of Indians saw Pakistan in an unfavorable light.
This is the background against which Indian leaders have said that a tactical nuclear attack on their forces, even on Pakistani territory, would be treated as a full-scale nuclear attack on India, and that they reserved the right to respond accordingly. Since India does not have tactical nukes, it could only retaliate with far more devastating strategic nuclear arms, possibly targeting Pakistani cities.
According to a 2002 estimate by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, a worst-case scenario in an Indo-Pakistani nuclear war could result in eight to 12 million fatalities initially, followed by many millions later from radiation poisoning. More recent studies have shown that up to a billion people worldwide might be put in danger of famine and starvation by the smoke and soot thrown into the troposphere in a major nuclear exchange in South Asia. The resulting “nuclear winter” and ensuing crop loss would functionally add up to a slowly developing global nuclear holocaust.
Last November, to reduce the chances of such a catastrophic exchange happening, senior Obama administration officials met in Washington with Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif — the final arbiter of that country’s national security policies — and urged him to stop the production of tactical nuclear arms. In return, they offered a pledge to end Islamabad’s pariah status in the nuclear field by supporting its entry into the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group to which India already belongs. Although no formal communiqué was issued after Sharif’s trip, it became widely known that he had rejected the offer.
This failure was implicit in the testimony that DIA Director Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart gave to the Armed Services Committee this February. “Pakistan’s nuclear weapons continue to grow,” he said. “We are concerned that this growth, as well as the evolving doctrine associated with tactical [nuclear] weapons, increases the risk of an incident or accident.”
Strategic nuclear warheads
Since that DIA estimate of human fatalities in a South Asian nuclear war, the strategic nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan have continued to grow. In January 2016, according to a U.S. congressional report, Pakistan’s arsenal probably consisted of 110 to 130 nuclear warheads. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, India has 90 to 110 of these.
China, the other regional actor, has approximately 260 warheads.
As the 1990s ended, with both India and Pakistan testing their new weaponry, their governments made public their nuclear doctrines. The National Security Advisory Board on Indian Nuclear Doctrine, for example, stated in August 1999 that “India will not be the first to initiate a nuclear strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail.”
India’s foreign minister explained at the time that the “minimum credible deterrence” mentioned in the doctrine was a question of “adequacy,” not numbers of warheads. In subsequent years, however, that yardstick of “minimum credible deterrence” has been regularly recalibrated as India’s policymakers went on to commit themselves to upgrade the country’s nuclear arms program with a new generation of more powerful hydrogen bombs designed to be city-busters.
In Pakistan in February 2000, President General Pervez Musharraf, who was also the army chief, established the Strategic Plan Division in the National Command Authority, appointing Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai as its director general. In October 2001, Kidwai offered an outline of the country’s updated nuclear doctrine in relation to its far more militarily and economically powerful neighbor, saying, “It is well known that Pakistan does not have a ‘no-first-use policy.’”
He then laid out the “thresholds” for the use of nukes. The country’s nuclear weapons, he pointed out, were aimed solely at India and would be available for use not just in response to a nuclear attack from that country, but should it conquer a large part of Pakistan’s territory (the space threshold), or destroy a significant part of its land or air forces (the military threshold), or start to strangle Pakistan economically (the economic threshold), or politically destabilize the country through large-scale internal subversion (the domestic destabilization threshold).
Of these, the space threshold was the most likely trigger. New Delhi as well as Washington speculated as to where the red line for this threshold might lie, though there was no unanimity among defense experts. Many surmised that it would be the impending loss of Lahore, the capital of Punjab, only 15 miles from the Indian border. Others put the red line at Pakistan’s sprawling Indus River basin.
Within seven months of this debate, Indian-Pakistani tensions escalated steeply in the wake of an attack on an Indian military base in Kashmir by Pakistani terrorists in May 2002. At that time, Musharraf reiterated that he would not renounce his country’s right to use nuclear weapons first. The prospect of New Delhi being hit by an atom bomb became so plausible that U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill investigated building a hardened bunker in the embassy compound to survive a nuclear strike. Only when he and his staff realized that those in the bunker would be killed by the aftereffects of the nuclear blast did they abandon the idea.
Unsurprisingly, the leaders of the two countries found themselves staring into the nuclear abyss because of a violent act in Kashmir, a disputed territory which had led to three conventional wars between the South Asian neighbors since 1947, the founding year of an independent India and Pakistan. As a result of the first of these in 1947 and 1948, India acquired about half of Kashmir, with Pakistan getting a third and the rest occupied later by China.
Kashmir, the root cause of enduring enmity
The Kashmir dispute dates back to the time when the British-ruled Indian subcontinent was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, and indirectly ruled princely states were given the option of joining either one. In October 1947, the Hindu maharaja of Muslim-majority Kashmir signed an “instrument of accession” with India after Muslim tribal raiders from Pakistan invaded his realm.
The speedy arrival of Indian troops deprived the invaders of the capital city, Srinagar. Later, they battled regular Pakistani troops until a United Nations-brokered ceasefire on Jan. 1, 1949. The accession document required that Kashmiris be given an opportunity to choose between India and Pakistan once peace was restored. This has not happened yet, and there is no credible prospect of it taking place.
Fearing a defeat in such a plebiscite, given the pro-Pakistani sentiments prevalent among the territory’s majority Muslims, India found several ways of blocking U.N. attempts to hold one. New Delhi then conferred a special status on the part of Kashmir it controlled and held elections for its legislature, while Pakistan watched with trepidation.
In September 1965, when its verbal protests proved futile, Pakistan attempted to change the status quo through military force. It launched a war that once again ended in stalemate and another U.N.-sponsored truce, which required the warring parties to return to the 1949 ceasefire line.
A third armed conflict between the two neighbors followed in December 1971, resulting in Pakistan’s loss of its eastern wing, which became an independent Bangladesh. Soon after, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi tried to convince Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to agree to transform the 460-mile-long ceasefire line in Kashmir (renamed the “Line of Control”) into an international border. Unwilling to give up his country’s demand for a plebiscite in all of pre-1947 Kashmir, Bhutto refused. So the stalemate continued.
During the military rule of Gen. Zia al Haq from 1977 to 1988, Pakistan initiated a policy of bleeding India with a thousand cuts by sponsoring terrorist actions both inside Indian Kashmir and elsewhere in the country. Delhi responded by bolstering its military presence in Kashmir and brutally repressing those of its inhabitants demanding a plebiscite or advocating separation from India, committing in the process large-scale human rights violations.
In order to stop infiltration by militants from Pakistani Kashmir, India built a double barrier of fencing 12-feet high with the space between planted with hundreds of land mines. Later, that barrier would be equipped as well with thermal imaging devices and motion sensors to help detect infiltrators. By the late 1990s, on one side of the Line of Control were 400,000 Indian soldiers and on the other 300,000 Pakistani troops. No wonder Pres. Bill Clinton called that border “the most dangerous place in the world.”
Today, with the addition of tactical nuclear weapons to the mix, it is far more so.
Even before Pakistan’s introduction of tactical nukes, tensions between the two neighbors were perilously high. Then suddenly, at the end of 2015, a flicker of a chance for the normalization of relations appeared. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had a cordial meeting with his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, on the latter’s birthday, Dec. 25, in Lahore.
But that hope was dashed when, in the early hours of January 2nd, four heavily armed Pakistani terrorists managed to cross the international border in Punjab, wearing Indian army fatigues, and attacked an air force base in Pathankot. A daylong gun battle followed. By the time order was restored on Jan. 5, all the terrorists were dead, but so were seven Indian security personnel and one civilian.
The United Jihad Council, an umbrella organization of separatist militant groups in Kashmir, claimed credit for the attack. The Indian government, however, insisted that the operation had been masterminded by Masood Azhar, leader of the Pakistan-based Jaish-e Muhammad — the Army of Muhammad.
As before, Kashmir was the motivating drive for the anti-India militants. Mercifully, the attack in Pathankot turned out to be a minor event, insufficient to heighten the prospect of war, though it dissipated any goodwill generated by the Modi-Sharif meeting.
There is little doubt, however, that a repeat of the atrocity committed by Pakistani infiltrators in Mumbai in November 2008, leading to the death of 166 people and the burning of that city’s landmark Taj Mahal Hotel, could have consequences that would be dire indeed. The Indian doctrine calling for massive retaliation in response to a successful terrorist strike on that scale could mean the almost instantaneous implementation of its Cold Start strategy. That, in turn, would likely lead to Pakistan’s use of tactical nuclear weapons, thus opening up the real possibility of a full-blown nuclear holocaust with global consequences.
Beyond the long-running Kashmiri conundrum lies Pakistan’s primal fear of the much larger and more powerful India, and its loathing of India’s ambition to become the hegemonic power in South Asia. Irrespective of party labels, governments in New Delhi have pursued a muscular path on national security aimed at bolstering the country’s defense profile.
Overall, Indian leaders are resolved to prove that their country is entering what they fondly call “the age of aspiration.” When, in July 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh officially launched a domestically built nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, the INS Arihant, it was hailed as a dramatic step in that direction. According to defense experts, that vessel was the first of its kind not to be built by one of the five recognized nuclear powers — the United States, Britain, China, France and Russia.
India’s two secret nuclear sites
On the nuclear front in India, there was more to come. Last December, an investigation by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity revealed that the Indian government was investing $100 million to build a top secret nuclear city spread over 13 square miles near the village of Challakere, 160 miles north of the southern city of Mysore.
When completed, possibly as early as 2017, it will be “the subcontinent’s largest military-run complex of nuclear centrifuges, atomic-research laboratories, and weapons- and aircraft-testing facilities.” Among the project’s aims is to expand the government’s nuclear research, to produce fuel for the country’s nuclear reactors and to help power its expanding fleet of nuclear submarines. It will be protected by a ring of garrisons, making the site a virtual military facility.
Another secret project, the Indian Rare Materials Plant near Mysore, is already in operation. It is a new nuclear enrichment complex that is feeding the country’s nuclear weapons programs, while laying the foundation for an ambitious project to create an arsenal of hydrogen bombs.
The overarching aim of these projects is to give India an extra stockpile of enriched uranium fuel that could be used in such future bombs. As a military site, the project at Challakere will not be open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency or by Washington, since India’s 2008 nuclear agreement with the U.S. excludes access to military-related facilities.
These enterprises are directed by the office of the prime minister, who is charged with overseeing all atomic energy projects. India’s Atomic Energy Act and its Official Secrets Act place everything connected to the country’s nuclear program under wraps. In the past, those who tried to obtain a fuller picture of the Indian arsenal and the facilities that feed it have been bludgeoned to silence.
Little wonder then that a senior White House official was recently quoted as saying, “Even for us, details of the Indian program are always sketchy and hard facts thin on the ground.” He added, “Mysore is being constantly monitored, and we are constantly monitoring progress in Challakere.”
However, according to Gary Samore, a former Obama administration coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, “India intends to build thermonuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrent against China. It is unclear, when India will realize this goal of a larger and more powerful arsenal, but they will.”
Once manufactured, there is nothing to stop India from deploying such weapons against Pakistan. “India is now developing very big bombs, hydrogen bombs that are city-busters,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a leading Pakistani nuclear and national security analyst. “It is not interested in … nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield; it is developing nuclear weapons for eliminating population centers.”
In other words, as the Kashmir dispute continues to fester, inducing periodic terrorist attacks on India and fueling the competition between New Delhi and Islamabad to outpace each other in the variety and size of their nuclear arsenals, the peril to South Asia in particular and the world at large only grows.
- Rural America Is On The Verge Of Collapse
The Economic Innovation Group’s (EIG) Distressed Communities Index (DCI) shows a significant economic transformation (from two distinct periods: 2007-2011 and 2012-2016) that occurred since the financial crisis. The shift of human capital, job creation, and business formation to metropolitan areas reveals that rural America is teetering on the edge of collapse.
Since the crisis, the number of people living in prosperous zip codes expanded by 10.2 million, to a total of 86.5 million, an increase that was much greater than any other social class. Meanwhile, the number of Americans living in distressed zip codes decreased to 3.4 million, to a total of 50 million, the smallest shift of any other social class. This indicates that the geography of economic pain is in rural America.
“While the overall population in distressed zip codes declined, the number of rural Americans in that category increased by nearly 1 million between the two periods. Rural zip codes exhibited the most volatility and were by far the most likely to be downwardly mobile on the index, with 30 percent dropping into a lower quintile of prosperity—nearly twice the proportion of urban zip codes that fell into a lower quintile. Meanwhile, suburban communities registered the greatest stability, with 61 percent remaining in the same quintile over both periods. Urban zip codes were the most robust—least likely to decline and more likely than their suburban counterparts to rise,” the report said.
Visualizing the collapse: Economic distress was mostly centered in the Southeast, Rust Belt, and South Central. In Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia, at least one-third of the population were located in distressed zip codes.
Prosperous zip codes were the top beneficiaries of the jobs recovery since the financial crisis. All zip codes saw job declines during the recession, each laying off several million jobs from 2007 to 2010. But by 2016, prosperous zip codes had 3.6 million jobs surplus over 2007 levels, which was more than the bottom 80% of distressed zip codes combined. It took five years for prosperous zip codes to replace all jobs lost from the financial crisis; meanwhile, distressed zip codes will never recover.
EIG shows that less than 25% of all counties have recovered from business closures from the recession.
“US business formation has been dismal in both magnitude and distribution since the Great Recession. The country’s population is almost evenly split between counties that have fully replaced (with 161 million residents) and those that have not (with 157.4 million). This divide is due to the fact that highly populous counties—those with more than 500,000 residents—were far more likely to add businesses above and beyond 2007 levels than their smaller peers. Nearly three in every five large counties added businesses on net over the period, compared to only one in every five small one,” the report said.
To highlight the weak recovery and geographic unevenness of new business formation, EIG shows that the entire country had 52,800 more business establishments in 2016 than it did in 2007.
Five counties (Los Angeles, CA; Brooklyn, NY; Harris, TX (Houston); Queens, NY; and Miami-Dade, FL. ) had a combined 55,500 more businesses in 2016 than before the recession. Without those five counties, the US economy would not have recovered.
On top of deep structural changes in rural America, JPMorgan told clients last week that the entire agriculture complex is on the verge of disaster, with farmers in rural America caught in the crossfire of an escalating trade war.
“Overall, this is a perfect storm for US farmers,” JPMorgan analyst Ann Duignan warned investors.
Farmers are facing tremendous headwinds, including a worsening trade war, collapsing soybean exports to China, global oversupply conditions, and crop yield losses in the Midwest due to flooding. This all comes at a time when farmers are defaulting and missing payments at alarming rates, forcing regional banks to restructure and refinance existing loans.
Today’s downturn of rural America is no different than what happened in the 1920s, 1930s, and the early 1980s.
- Academic Elitists Have Invented A New Way To Rig Voting In The Future
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
The question of whether or not “democracy” works is always being studied, by proponents of freedom as well as by proponents of authoritarianism. The founding fathers of the sovereign American experiment were far more intelligent than some critics today give them credit for – they knew full well that democracy does NOT work, not without some rules which make certain rights inalienable. This is why they modeled the original American system as a Republic, not a democracy.
Today, there are many people (primarily in academia) that seem to think they are gifted with more insight into our political and social systems than the founders of old, and are constantly trying to sell a myriad of concepts for improving our existing structure. Some of these people are well meaning, and some of them are not, but their ideas for “fixing” the problems of our political and social systems almost universally ignore or overlook the root causes of those problems. They try to cure the symptoms rather than the disease.
It should also be noted that many academics live much of their lives separate from the real world, and so their views on what ails society and how it should be fixed are rather naive, or at least highly biased. Many behave as though they sit somewhere on the autistic scale; others have made a career out of going to school for far too long and have no interest in learning to survive in the private sector.
My point is, these are not the kinds of people that are going to solve the world’s malfunctions – they can’t even solve their own malfunctions. In fact, they are often the kinds of people that make the world worse. Unfortunately, in the universe of academia there is a propensity for arrogance, elitism, and also rampant exploitation by powerful groups seeking to turn academics to the dark side.
Keep all of this in mind as we explore this next issue, because I believe it comes into play in a very insidious manner…
Voting As A Game
Americans are indelibly passionate about the voting process, even those who don’t often vote. We like to have the option to vote, even when we see the system as broken or corrupt. The one-person-one-vote dynamic is seen as sacred, though it does have some failings.
For example, votes are often manipulated according to regions of influence and peer pressure. Metropolitan areas with large populations reliant on welfare initiatives and socialist policies are predictably leftist, and vote majority Democrat. Rural areas where populations are spread more thin tend to be more self reliant, individualistic and traditional, so they vote on the conservative side of the spectrum. The problem is that leftist regions tend to have greater populations, meaning the left has greater influence through collectivist peer pressure over a greater number of voters.
The founders sought to solve the problem of regional manipulation in Presidential elections through the Electoral College, which assigned “points” (electoral college votes) to each state according to population levels. This turned voting for presidents into a kind of game, whereby candidates could use strategy to campaign in certain states to effectively secure more points than their opponents. It removed the dominance of major population centers as a factor and made it possible for rural voters to gain an upper hand over metropolitan voters.
In other words, the Electoral College makes the issue of “majority rule” obsolete when choosing a president. When this works in one side’s favor, they love the electoral college and will defend it proudly. When it doesn’t work in their favor, they usually want to abolish the Electoral College completely. This is when suggestions of “news systems” tend to arise.
Regardless of who they end up benefiting, current voting structures are rather brilliantly devised as long as the political system is operating free from corrupt influences. Of course, as many of us in the liberty movement are well aware, there is very little in politics that is untouched by evil intent.
When it comes to voting for political candidates, the system can and is controlled in a multitude of ways. For example, elitist groups can use their vast financial resources to support the candidates they prefer, thereby giving them an overt advantage. By controlling party primaries they can dictate who becomes the primary candidate and who gets snubbed (as we saw with candidates like Ron Paul or more recently Bernie Sanders). No candidate gets through the primaries unless the party leaders allow them to get through the primaries, and these leaders will break their own stated rules in order to ensure their preferred candidate wins.
They can also buy candidates on both sides of the aisle (sometimes far in advance of their candidacy, as with both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump), thus ensuring that no matter who wins the most votes, the elites will have one of their puppets in office. In the liberty movement we refer to this as the “false left/right paradigm”.
In my view, the illusion that there is a choice in voting is more dangerous than living in a society where you are told you have no right to vote. At least in the latter situation you are not participating in your own enslavement.
The illusion of choice is a powerful weapon for the elitist class; it gives the populace false hope and a false sense that they have a say in their own futures. The theater of participation tricks the populace into sitting idle and not taking any real actions that could actually change things for the better; as long as they vote, they feel they have fulfilled their duty as citizens. When they vote, they put their fate in the hands of a political figure, instead of taking control of their own lives. This is why it is likely that even in the event that the elites gain the complete totalitarian centralization they ultimately want, they will still allow voting to continue in one form or another, as long as they are certain they can control the outcome.
The question is, how do they plan to do this? For a presidential election in which there are usually only two candidates given mainstream coverage and party resources, control is much easier. But, what about in the legislative process? Or voting at the local and state level? It’s very difficult to control every participant within the system – people with conscience might slip through the cracks and wreak havoc, or sovereignty movements might gain the upper hand over time. Current methods of manipulating the process are rather crude, and are becoming more evident to more and more people…
Enter “Quadratic Voting”…
Quadratic Voting is the creation of a former professor from the University of Chicago and a current senior researcher at Microsoft Research in New York by the name of Glen Weyl. Weyl is yet another “rising star” in elitist academic circles being increasingly promoted within the mainstream. He is a person they will probably one day be describing as a “genius of our time” in the next 5-10 years, which is a dubious distinction these day given that the mainstream also props up painful fakes like Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson as “geniuses”.
Weyl’s public exposure began after co-writing a book entitled ‘Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism And Democracy For A Just Society’; a treatise which desperately tries to present itself as almost “libertarian” and championing free markets, while at the same time declaring private property a “monopolistic” injustice (private property being a key pillar of free markets) that should be dissolved into a communistic public commons. The book also contains Weyl’s explanation of Quadratic Voting and why he believes the system of one-person-one-vote must be changed.
This co-option of the libertarian free market image for elitist means reminds me of Cass Sunstein’s “Libertarian Paternalism” which he discusses in his book ‘Nudge’; a book about controlling populations through subversive propaganda methods planted by paid agents in social media and other web venues. Sunstein promotes control through a “hidden hand”; letting the public THINK they are developing their own views and opinions while governments secretly “nudge” them towards the thinking the elites prefer.
These people are clearly globalists that have no respect for the tenets of Libertarianism or sovereignty movements, yet they feel the need to ascribe libertarian values to their globalist projects. This is never explained, but it is perhaps an attempt to undermine the conservative groups that oppose them. A favorite strategy of globalists is to co-opt the ideas and groups that they hate and then sabotage their image over time.
Weyl’s quadratic voting system is also built on the same notion of a “hidden hand”. Bloomberg’s expose on the method even describes it as such, while applauding quadratic voting as a means to prevent “zealotry” among voters.
Weyl is also a proponent of universal basic income, and is a partner with a group called Democracy Earth, which claims to be pursuing “decentralization” while focusing on the erasure of national borders and the “globalization of democratic governance” (the exact opposite of decentralization). Democracy Earth has a rather impressive list of mainstream partners on its website, including The Atlantic, the BBC and the World Economic Forum.
Now that we are privy to the types of groups supporting the quadratic voting idea, it becomes easier to understand the goal behind it.
Quadratic voting is essentially a way to transform the voting process into a game, even more so than it already is. In a recent experiment by the Democrat controlled caucus of the Colorado House of Representatives, Dem. legislators were each assigned 100 voting “tokens”. One token can be used to buy one vote on one issue or one piece of legislation, but two votes can be cast on a single piece of legislation for a cost of four tokens, and ten votes for 100 tokens. Once a legislator runs out of tokens, they run out of votes.
It’s a novel idea, if not rather complex and impractical for making any real progress in politics or government because it fails to address the core problem, which is internal and rampant corruption of the system itself. In fact, quadratic voting could conceivably make it easier to manipulate the voting system by allowing elites to rig the game in favor of a particular outcome at a level we have never seen before.
The quadratic formula is used in the real world as a means to predict certain outcomes within certain systems in which constants are applied. For example, you could use the quadratic formula to predict where an artillery shell or missile was going to land by calculating its arc or parabola. As long as the force of gravity is a constant and the missile travels at the intended velocity and in the intended direction, you can determine exactly where it will hit in the future.
The quadratic formula can also be applied to certain games of contest in order to predetermine a winner. For example, the Japanese game of Go has a system for “handicapping” more advanced players when they are in a tournament against newer or weaker players. The handicap is partially based on quadratics, and allows the weaker player advantages against his more experienced opponent that include starting out with extra moves and pieces. It is noted often by Go players that a handicap can allow a weaker player to win consistently against a stronger player as long as the stronger player makes a minimum number of mistakes.
Now consider quadratic voting for a moment, and how it turns voting into a game.
First, it assigns tokens or value to votes; Weyl even muses that these voting tokens could create a vote economy in which votes are bought and sold like a commodity…though he believes enforcing a universal basic income would solve the problem of the rich buying up all the votes. Well, thank goodness for that….
Second, as in the game of Go, a party with a majority in a legislature or forum would have an immediate advantage over the other party, but they could be easily handicapped. How? The elites would merely need to control a few of those legislators (instead of trying to control a majority of them). As in Go, a few minor and deliberately made mistakes by these legislators in how they spend their vote tokens for the stronger party could cripple the ability of their party to successfully defeat an opponent on a new bill or law. By throwing the game, these few puppet legislators could allow the elites to predict the outcome of a vote every single time in such a subtle and nuanced way that the public might never realize what is happening.
There is even a contingent of Go mathematicians that are developing algorithms that they believe can use quadratics to predict the outcome of a handicapped Go game every time. Quadratic methods have also famously been used by mathematicians to cheat at casino blackjack and make likely card draws more predictable. I suspect this is something that would also be done in quadratic voting; if something can be predicted, then it can be controlled.
In other words, under quadratic voting a vast political and legislative machine could be maneuvered with minimal effort and minimal resources.
It should come as no surprise then that the concept of quadratic voting is also being pushed into mainstream consciousness slowly but surely by the globalist controlled press. Vox suggested that the method should be applied to the Supreme Court in situations where the “rights of a group” should be given more weight than the rights of individuals. Bloomberg declared it a “success” as it was applied in Colorado, and gushes over the fact that under the new voting dynamic legislation to solve the Gender Pay Gap received the most tokens.
Considering that the gender pay gap doesn’t exist when one looks at the real math and statistics behind the issue, and considering the fact that the new method was not tested in a system where two sides are actually ideologically opposed to each other, I hardly see how quadratic voting was successful in anything other than creating a more absurdly complex political echo chamber. That said, I can see exactly why globalists are latching onto Weyl’s idea and why Bloomberg is so quick to sing its praises.
The entire system benefits the powers-that-be by creating a complex illusion that convinces the masses that voting is now incorruptible because legislators are psychologically compelled by cost vs. “zealotry”, or the strategy of the competition. But, as noted, by controlling a minority of legislators on either side of the game, the elites can dictate or predict the entire outcome of each vote using tiny and imperceptible “mistakes” to rig the contest. How this would translate to popular voting is not exactly clear, but it certainly changes the face of legislation forever.
In a world where electronic voting is the norm, what level of manipulation could be achieved to an election outcome using quadratic voting and nearly imperceptible rigging of a select and small number of machines in each region…? The con would be untraceable.
Yes, in many ways voting today is already rigged, but not to such a refined degree as this. Quadratic voting is another futurist concept that is intended to assure the public that the problems of our system are being solved through peripheral changes and technological progress while failing to address the age old demons of elitism and globalism that are the true source of our misery.
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- Drivers Are Turning To Sex Dolls And Mannequins To Use HOV Lanes
Reality may not be The Onion (yet), but it’s encroaching dangerously close on Curb your Enthusiasm.
An increasing number of drivers are illegally using HOV carpool lanes by stuffing mannequins, skeletons, even blowup sex dolls and various other items into their cars to try and fool police into thinking that they have a passenger when they don’t. The practice has reached a fever pitch, according to the Wall Street Journal.
So now, police are fighting back by shaming those who are caught committing the illegal act on social media. New York, California and Florida have all created dedicated police units to patrol HOV lanes for cars with dummy passengers. Washington state is weighing a bill to raise penalties for HOV lane abuse, while other police departments are simply shaming transgressors to discourage others.
Meanwhile, drivers are evolving and getting more creative with the way that they try to cheat the rules. This has led to state troopers calling it “absolutely satisfying” when they do catch somebody breaking the law.
Suffolk County Highway Patrol Deputy Inspector David Regina said: “There’s nothing to say you can’t have a mannequin in your passenger seat, but if you’re skirting the rules and breaking the law, it becomes an issue.”
The California Highway Patrol recently shamed a man who was caught in Oakland with two fake passengers in his car. “Clever Carpool offender caught cheating system with TWO dummies in back seat. Clever officer checked both dummies’ pulse to make sure!” they wrote on Twitter.
In Arizona, drivers can actually wind up with points on their license for faking passengers. State police spokesman Bart Graves said: “It happens all the time. We are perplexed as to why people would take those chances and think they can get away with it.”
He continued: “The dummies run the gamut. Some are fairly creative, but most are not. Most people move in a car, they talk. When someone is sitting motionless, that’s one indication. In a case in April, the trooper knew something was off with the passenger.”
The police in Arizona patrol carpool lanes the most during morning and afternoon rush hours. When they catch someone, they post online. “Another one Busted!” they wrote on Twitter with a photo of a female mannequin with a dark wig, sunglasses, a red hat and blue hoodie.
The cost of a life-sized dummy – generally used for things like front yard Santas or Halloween costumes – is about $50 plus shipping on Amazon. One Amazon vendor got wise and actually started offering a product called “Carpool Kenny” which was an inflatable torso, akin to the “Autopilot” from the Airplane movies.
“He’s never talking, always on time, and likes my music,” one review of the product said. “He never complains when I put him in the trunk,” another said.
Barry Kowitt, a Florida lawyer who often represents traffic scofflaws, said he tries to get clients off on technicalities: “Sometimes these people are so mortified and embarrassed that they just pay the fine.”
Washington State Sen. Marko Liias introduced a bill to raise fines by $200 “where a dummy, doll, or other human facsimile is used,” raising that price to $686 for repeat offenders. The national average is around $400.
Said one driver caught on the Long Island expressway, “I have a big sense of humor. The whole thing is funny, but I feel humiliated. I don’t want any more trouble.”
- Trump Attacks Military Industrial Complex, Urges Infrastructure Investments In Middle East
Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
For the first time in over half a century, an American President has actually come out attacking the Military Industrial Complex. Of course, everyone knows of President Dwight D. Eisenhauer’s famous outgoing 1961 speech warning the world (and the incoming President Kennedy) what sort of monster had arisen at the heart of America’s defense institutions. Very little on the matter was said on the frightening topic by decades of political leaders who rose to prominence in the shadow of JFK’s corpse.
Instead, the beast grew like a malignant cancer over the ensuing years as a major branch of the British-run deep state that carried out a coup with Sir Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in 1946 and the MI6-directed re-organization of American intelligence with the creation of the CIA in 1947.
After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, networks of neoconservative contaminated all branches of government in both parties bringing the USA into a frenzied military doctrine centered on regime change wars, oil-centered geopolitics and unipolarism totally uncharacteristic with the better constitutional traditions of the nation. This geopolitical doctrine nearly drove the west into a full military confrontation with Russia and China in recent years.
The Tide Begins to Turn
On May 20 speaking to Fox News, President Trump echoed Eisenhauer’s warnings. Under a coterie of Trump’s war-mongering advisors such as John Bolton, Gina Haspel, Terrence O’Shaughnessy and Mike Pompeo, America has recently been brought to the brink of war with Iran. While Trump has too often accommodated this hive of neocons, his recent statements and repeated calls for cooperation with Russia and China demonstrate a sound push back which should be taken very seriously. In that Fox interview Trump said:
“With all of everything that’s going on, and I’m not one that believes—you know, I’m not somebody that wants to go in to war, because war hurts economies, war kills people, most importantly—by far most importantly.”
You know, in Syria, with the caliphate, so I wipe out 100 percent of the caliphate. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to have these crazy people who run around blowing up stores and blowing up things—these are seriously ill people. I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, they’re wiped,’ you know, ISIS. But, I wiped out 100 percent of the caliphate. I say, ‘I want to bring our troops back home.’ The place went crazy. You have people here in Washington, they never want to leave.”
‘You know what I’ll do, I’ll leave a couple hundred soldiers behind,’ but if it was up to them, they’d bring thousands of soldiers in. Someday people will explain it, but you do have a group, and they call it the military-industrial complex. They never want to leave. They always want to fight.”
Trump continued to explain his preference for economic over military solutions which is certainly in alignment with the Russia and Chinese approach in the Middle East. Both great Eurasian powers have repeatedly stated that the only hope for the Middle East and Africa involves:
1) The cessation of support of said organizations by western geopoliticians and their allies.
2) Programs for long term infrastructure investment to stabilize the conflict torn regions while provide a dynamic of long term thinking emerge. While Putin has come out most forcefully on the former, China has brought its grand Belt and Road infrastructure design to Arab nations with extremely positive results. Over 17 Arab nations have signed cooperation agreements on BRI-connected projects worth $190 billion dollars and Syria’s leadership has explicitly embraced this pathway as the only hope for the future.
Trump’s Surprising Call for Infrastructure in the Middle East
The day before Trump’s “military industrial complex” interview, Jared Kushner (senior White House Advisor) made headlines by announcing a Middle East infrastructure investment conference in Manama Bahrain on June 25-26 which will bring together finance ministers, and business leaders from around the world to discuss a new doctrine for the middle east. The purpose of the summit will be to by-pass the unresolvable obstacles which decades of obsession on “political solutions” without economic development has created.
Trying to attain a political remedy to the injustices accrued in the Middle East is impossible without economic development programs first transforming the entire physical economic (and thus socio-cultural) potentials of all participants. As long as stagnancy and scarcity dominate a region suffering water, energy and education shortages, the spiritual environment of hope and security needed for trust and dialogue is politically impossible.
Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin understood this fact when he shook Yasser Arafat’s hand in Oslo and said “the courage belongs to those who have the courage to change their axioms”. Arafat and Rabin understood that their entente would only succeed if it was driven by much needed energy, water and transportation infrastructure benefiting both Israelis and Palestinians alike. Technocrats running the World Bank also understood this when nearly $2 billion of loans to invest in said projects were blocked and the plan sabotaged before his 1995 London-directed assassination.
Discussing the renewed plan for economic development, a White House official told CNN on May 19th “that you can’t have peace without economic stability and opportunity, but you also can’t have economic opportunity and stability without peace and free of terror and resolving some of these core issues”. The official also said “If there’s peace, it will touch on not only the West Bank and Gaza but also Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt. The economies will become integrated. Think about how much money is spent on bullets right now. If it could be spent on infrastructure and human capital, think about how much better the region could be”
Kushner’s conference reflects a second chance at that sabotaged opportunity and again brings American modes of conduct into harmony with the Chinese philosophy for Middle East stabilization. Kushner told CNN that “people are letting their grandfathers’ conflict destroy their children’s futures. This will present an exciting, realistic and viable pathway forward that does not currently exist”. The plan is driven by low interest loans, grant money and private investment.
The Military Industrial Complex and the broader deep state controlled from British Intelligence is certainly not happy with this turn of events.
Thus far, no words have yet been said on US-Russia-China cooperation on this program, but as we move into the upcoming G20 Summit in Japan and Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping have announced meetings at that venue, there are positive grounds for cautious optimism.
- Shocking Photo Shows Mt. Everest "Death Zone" Traffic Jam As Climber Fatalities Rise
CNN has published a shocking image of crowds of climbers stuck in a queue leading up to the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak, after it was reported that an American climber died this week. At least eight have died during the spring climbing season thus far amid reports that hundreds of climbers have faced “traffic jams” near the peak at Everest’s most dangerous point, called “the death zone”.
A 55-year old American mountaineer named Donald Lynn Cash died after fainting from high altitude sickness while descending the summit, and another, Indian climber Anjali Kulkarni also died. According to CNN, which spoke to Kulkarni’s family, she had been stuck in a long line above camp four, just before the summit, which sits at a dangerous 8,000 meters (26,247 feet) above sea level, where climbers face oxygen deprivation and threat of severe altitude sickness.
Photo taken on May 22, 2019 and released by climber Nirmal Purja’s Project Possible expedition, showing dangerous traffic jam above Everest’s deadly camp 4. Image via CNN. The CNN report attributed both of their deaths to the back-up of crowds of climbers stuck near the top, which some local officials have denied.
One report has estimated that between five and 10 climbers die on Mt. Everest each year, which means already this year the death toll could be headed for record highs.
The image showing the climber traffic jam was described as follows:
Climber Nirmal Purja posted a picture on Instagram of the heavy human traffic on the mountain Wednesday, showing a dense trail of climbers huddling on an exposed ridge to the summit. He added that there were roughly 320 people in the queue to the top of the mountain in an area known as the “death zone.”
The small window of opportunity to beat inclement weather this year may be contributing to the deadly traffic jams at the top. “The weather has not been very great this climbing season, so when there is a small window when the weather clears up, climbers make the move,” Danduraj Ghimire, director general of Nepal’s Tourism Department, said.
“On May 22, after several days of bad weather, there was a small window of clear weather, when more than 200 mountaineers ascended Everest. The main cause of deaths on Everest has been high altitude sickness which is what happened with most of the climbers who lost their lives this season as well,” he added.
A separate report noted that on Thursday alone, over 120 people made it to the summit. “More than 120 climbers scaled Everest on Thursday, but some of them were caught in the crowd of people on the slopes, leading to exhaustion, dehydration and death, Nepali officials said Friday,” according to the report.
This means that multiple hundreds were simultaneously scrambling to the summit during the same small 2-day window of time — not counting others at lower sections of the mountain.
Mt. Everest file photo, via Filmy Mantra The trek is so dangerous, and the threat of severe oxygen deprivation so ever present, that most often climbers who lose their lives at the upper levels of the mountain can’t be safely retrieved, and are simply “buried” by layers of snow and ice.
As a BBC reported noted earlier this year, nearly 300 climbers total have died on the mountain since the 1920s, two-thirds of which are still buried on the side of the mountain.
- Workers Of The World, Unite!
Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,
The dawn of war is a time of simple clarity and purpose. Good guys vs. bad guys. Cowboys vs. Indians. Confederates vs. Yankees. Coppers vs. robbers. It’s a time when lines are drawn, songs are sang, and drums are beaten with gaiety and confidence.
Indeed, calls for ‘a jolly little war’ are always greeted with merriment and optimism. This also goes for the dawn of a trade war. Regardless of whether you’re from Scranton or Suzhou, the escalating Trump vs. Xi standoff all seems so virtuous. “We’re right, they’re wrong,” and vice versa.
Here in the USA, the perspective is crystal clear. America’s rightful bounty is within reach. After several Presidents that were light in the loafers, there’s finally a leader of the free world with the brass fortitude to reach out and grab it for his fellow countrymen. And why not?
Several decades of getting spanked by Chinese grunt laborers have American workers longing for reprisal. This ain’t their granddaddy’s economy. They’ve been repurposed from well-paying manufacturing jobs to low-level service workers. The relentless progression has been demoralizing. Given a fair shake, American workers just know they’ll kick tail and take names.
Yet, as far as we can tell, Trump’s fight is a day late and a dollar short. The time to stand up for the American worker came and went while Ray Dalio was busy getting absurdly rich from the financialization of the economy. What’s more, the means to stand up for the American worker had – and still has – little to do with slapping tariffs on Chinese made doohickeys.
We’ll have more on this in a moment. But first, some dawn of war merriment out of the Middle Kingdom…
Trade War! Trade War!
China’s 40 year economic boom has all the trappings of miraculous growth. Real wealth has been created. Living standards have improved. And mega cities have sprouted up from the barren earth like garden weeds following a spring rain.
For perspective, between 2011 and 2013 China used more cement than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century. According to the International Cement Review, an industry publication based in London, between 1901 and 2000 the U.S. used 4.4 gigatons of cement, whereas China used 6.6 gigatons of cement between 2011 and 2013.
Without question, China deserve an award for its rapid disfiguration of the landscape. Yet there are other consequences too. Not only did all this mass splattering of cement rapidly disfigure China’s landscape. It also rapidly disfigured the national psyche.
Hoots, whoops, and the state media’s anti-U.S. propaganda machine has brought forth new and creative additions to the culture. This week, as reported by Zero Hedge, a song titled “Trade War” went viral on the Chinese social media platform, WeChat.
The song, set to the tune of an anti-Japanese song from the 1960s, begins with the rousing chorus:
“Trade war! Trade war!
Not afraid of the outrageous challenge!
Not afraid of the outrageous challenge!
A trade war is happening over the Pacific Ocean!”The lyrics also include: “if the perpetrator wants to fight, we will beat him out of his wits.”
What sort of deceit could provoked such drivel?
Workers of the World, Unite!
Several decades of perpetual credit creation courtesy of the Fed’s artificially low interest rates have had countless unintended consequences for the global economy. In short, the economy’s reconfigured itself in ways it otherwise wouldn’t have. One example is the offshoring of U.S. jobs to China and the massive trade imbalance between the two countries.
Where did American consumers get the endless supply of credit to consume all the made in China goods? Where did the money that showed up in the paychecks of Chinese workers come from? If you follow the money back up the supply chain the culpability for its origination is the Fed.
Still, it takes two to tango. You see, China could have rejected the fiat dollars they were being sent. They were conjured from nothing. Why trade real goods and products, fabricated with real raw materials, for dubious abstractions?
And therein lies the second part of the deceit. For the scam to work, the Chinese government had to go along with it. And as far as we can tell, they went along with it for several reasons: (1) the money was too good, and (2) it gave the Chinese populace a purpose in life.
But as China reaped more and more of the Fed’s fake money, Beijing had to debase the Chinese yuan at greater and greater rates to keep their cheap labor advantage over U.S. workers. Year after year, decade after decade, the U.S. heartland was hollowed out and deindustrialized, and its prior vitality was reconstructed in China.
All the while, the excess credit was used to financialize American businesses, where, rather than borrowing money for capital expenditures, corporations borrowed money to boost share prices. Wall Street was rewarded for their part in the money shuffling, as the cheap credit that pumped up financial assets was the same cheap credit that pumped up China’s economy. Main Street, on the other hand, was rewarded with stagnant wages and exploding debts.
The real dirty dead, which allowed the giant fiasco in the first place, occurred on August 15, 1971. That’s when Nixon defaulted on the Bretton Woods system and terminated the agreement that allowed other nations to redeem their paper dollars, acquired through trade, for gold. Since then, debts and deficits have gone completely haywire.
When it comes down to it the gripes of the American worker and the Chinese worker – and all workers of the world – should be united not against capitalism, as promoted by Marx. But against the curse of fake money and the governments that perpetuate it.
Of course, recognition of this fact would require honest thought and contemplation. And why bother when you can mindlessly bang the drums and chant the songs of jolly trade war merriment.
- Chicago Schools Blow $54,000 To Reprint Yearbook Because Kids Made "OK" Hand Gesture In Some Photos
Two Chicago high schools are going to be spending $54,000 to reprint yearbooks after discovering several photos of students making an “OK” hand gesture that had been joked to be associated with racism on sites like 4chan, according to CBS.
The symbol was thrust into the spotlight after users on 4chan began to joke that it should falsely be associated with racism because the three fingers extended can be interpreted to make a “W”, while the thumb and pointer finger can be interpreted to make a “P”. If it sounds like a stretch, that’s because it is a stretch – on purpose.
As the Southern Law Poverty Center says, the symbol was basically conceived for the sole purpose of trolling and “triggering liberals”:
The smirk that almost inevitably accompanies the “OK” sign, that simplest of hand signals, is the dead giveaway in the shroud of internet-age befuddlement: Does the sign, the thumb and forefinger joined together in a circle, the remaining three fingers splayed out behind, mean “all’s good?” Or does it mean “white power” instead?
The smirk gives away the proper answer: You’re being trolled.
The social-media-driven controversy over the meaning of the well-known hand sign has arisen in part as the result of a deliberate hoax concocted on the internet message board 4chan, which in addition to its well-earned reputation as a gateway to the racist “alt-right” is perhaps more broadly known as the home of trolling culture.
So when it gets flashed during a national broadcast, or during a video being shot to promote the Coast Guard, or by a cluster of Proud Boys and “Patriots,” what it’s about most of the time is a deliberate attempt to “trigger liberals” into overreacting to a gesture so widely used that virtually anyone has plausible deniability built into their use of it in the first place.
Mission accomplished.
The hand gesture, sometimes called the “circle game” is formed by making an “OK” symbol with your fingers and sometimes turning it upside down. The “circle game” used to result in the symbol flasher doling out a friendly punch in the shoulder to any person whose eyes made their way onto the symbol, which used to be flashed in purposefully unexpected places in order to “catch” onlookers. It was a staple and a mainstay in frat houses and high school locker rooms long before it was ever (even falsely) associated with racism.
But now, school administrators – who are always so in touch with younger students – have decided that it has “taken on a sinister connotation, because far right racist groups have been using it to advocate for white power.”
This prompted the District Superintendent, Joylynn Pruitt-Adams, to write an email to parents stating:
“The sign has more recently become associated with white nationalism. The photos in question, as well as all the other club team/photos in which students are striking poses and making gestures, will be replaced with the straight-forward group shots.”
The school board also had considered putting stickers over the photos as an alternative to a reprint but ultimately decided that dropping $54,000 in taxpayer money was a better idea, as stickers may have drawn even more attention to the photographs. Because reprinting the entire yearbook isn’t going to draw any attention to them, either.
Stickers would “place a cloud of suspicion over all the students in those photos, regardless of whether they used the sign or not,” Pruitt-Adams wrote in the letter.
She continued:
“Regardless of intent, however, there is a real and negative impact. Many students, not only our students of color, experience this gesture as a symbol of White supremacy. Potentially subjecting our students to this trauma is simply not acceptable.”
The best part is that the photos were taken in October 2018, which was “before the gesture was widely known to have any association with white nationalism,” school officials said.
So now, while other students worldwide are signing yearbooks as the school year closes, students at Oak Park and River Forest High Schools will have to wait another four weeks for their yearbook reprint. All because administrators can’t seem to get over the fact that something, somewhere, in someway, may inadvertently represent one iota of racism in some circles elsewhere across the world.
Instead of signing yearbooks normally, students will be given an eight page blank booklet to sign while they’re waiting for the yearbooks to arrive.
Congratulations, seniors!
- The Belligerence Of Empire
Authored by Kenn Orphan via Counterpunch.org,
“Capitalism’s gratuitous wars and sanctioned greed have jeopardized the planet and filled it with refugees. Much of the blame for this rests squarely on the shoulders of the government of the United States. Seventeen years after invading Afghanistan, after bombing it into the ‘stone age’ with the sole aim of toppling the Taliban, the US government is back in talks with the very same Taliban. In the interim it has destroyed Iraq, Libya and Syria. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives to war and sanctions, a whole region has descended into chaos, ancient cities—pounded into dust.”
– Arundhati Roy
“As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.”
― Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
― Smedley Butler, War is a Racket
“It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, 31 March 1968
Empire understands nothing except ruthless expansion. It has no other raison d’etre. In the past this meant the violent acquisition of lands and territories by a militarized system where caste was very apparent and visible. But today the dealings of empire are far more duplicitous. The ruling order of this age expands empire via the acquisition of capital while using the military industrial complex to police its exploits. But there is an insidious social conditioning at work which has led the general public to where it is today, a state of “inverted totalitarianism” as political philosopher Sheldon Wolin explained. Indeed, capitalism has morphed into the unassailable religion of the age even among the working class. Its tenets are still viewed as sacrosanct.
Violence is the sole language of empire. It is this only currency it uses to enforce its precepts and edicts, both at home and abroad. Eventually this language becomes internalized within the psyche of the subjects. Social and cultural conditioning maintained through constant subtle messaging via mass media begins to mold the public will toward that of authoritarian conformity. The American Empire is emblematic of this process. There is mass compliance to the dictates of the ruling class and this occurs most often without any prompting or debate whatsoever. In this dictatorship of money the poor are looked at with ridicule and contempt, and are often punished legally for their imposed poverty.
But the social conditioning of the American public has led toward a bizarre allegiance to its ruling class oppressors. Propaganda still works here and most are still besotted with the notion of America being a bastion of “freedom and democracy.” The growing gap between the ultra-wealthy and the poor and the gutting of civil liberties are ignored. And blind devotion is especially so when it comes to US foreign policy.
Most Americans still believe they live in the greatest country on the planet. They believe the American military to be noble and that they always reluctantly go into or are forced into war. Indeed, both the Democrats and Republicans possess an uncanny ability to bridge their ideological distances when it comes to defending US militarism, the Pentagon and the war machine of imperialism. But this is tied to the defense of capitalism, the ruling class, and the ultimate reason for war: the protection of that class’s global capital investments.
The persecution of Chelsea Manning, much like the case of Julian Assange, is demonstrative of this. It is a crusade against truth tellers that has been applauded from both sides of the American establishment, liberal and conservative alike. It does not matter that she helped to expose American war crimes. On the contrary, this is seen as heresy to the Empire itself. Manning’s crime was exposing the underbelly of the beast. A war machine which targeted and killed civilians and journalists by soldiers behind a glowing screen thousands of miles away, as if they were playing a video game.
Indeed, those deadened souls pulling the virtual trigger probably thought they were playing a video game since this is how the military seduced them to serve in their ranks in the first place. A kind of hypnotic, addictive, algorithmic tyranny of sorts. It is a form of escapism that so many young Americans are enticed by given their sad prospects in a society that has denuded the commons as well as their future. That it was a war based on lies against an impoverished nation already deeply weakened from decades of American led sanctions is inconsequential. Non-American life is routinely downgraded in comparisons to subjects of the Empire, even poor subjects, via rigorous conditioning, a prerequisite of military training. Flesh, bone and blood are reduced to a two dimensional drone image. The “other,” whether they be nationals of foreign lands or migrants, are mere avatars, projections of a psychic animus which have been painted by the ruling class as “threats to the homeland.”
The guardians of this narrative, those craven generals who delight in bloody forays but who wouldn’t dare place even a toe on a real battlefield, or the grim shadowy ghouls who haunt the halls of the Pentagon, or the purulent politicians who pontificate on meaningless terms like “American exceptionalism” and the “indispensable nation,” know how dangerous Chelsea Manning is to the daily workings of the death cult that is American Empire. She stands to expose the sham for what it is. And without working class kids to act as cannon fodder to protect the wealthy’s booty abroad they would be lost.
They fear Manning’s courage because they can neither plumb its depths nor navigate its landscape. It is an alien to them. Courage to them is the kind that comes in the form of mass murderers like sniper Chris Kyle, a psychopath mercenary in loyal service to the forces of capital. He, like the other servicemen and women in the military, protected the interests of oil companies, US weapons manufacturers and building contractors in conquered territories, but he embodies Americana more than any other figure today because he carried out the orders of empire without question. He killed the so called savages who supposedly threatened the American “way of life.” That he was an invader in their country is never challenged within the empire. On the contrary, the natives are cast as the “intruders” and “insurgents” while the invading military forces are portrayed as “freedom fighters” who are “defending the homeland” and spreading “democracy.”
Today Iran and Venezuela are once again in the crosshairs of the American Empire’s belligerence. Their defiance to the dominant socioeconomic order will simply not be tolerated by the global ruling caste, represented as the unquestioned “interests” of the United States. The imposed suffering on these nations has been twisted as proof that they are now in need of American salvation in the form of even more crippling sanctions, coups, neoliberal austerity and military intervention. As the corporate vultures lie in wait for the next carcass of a society to feed upon, the hawks are busy building the case for the continuation and expansion of capitalist wars of conquest.
Bolton and Pompeo are now the equivalent of the generals who carved up Numidia for the wealthy families of ancient Rome, with Trump, the half-witted, narcissistic and cruel emperor, presiding over the whole in extremis farce. Indeed, the bloated orange Emperor issued the latest of his decrees in his usual banal fashion, via tweet:
“If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!”
One can query when Iran, or any other nation has ever “threatened” the United States, but that question will never be asked by the corporate press who are also in service to Empire. They are, in fact, its mouthpiece and advocate. The US has at least 900 military bases and colonial outposts scattered around the planet, yet this is never looked at as imperialistic in the least by the establishment, including its media. Scores of nations lie in ruins or are besieged with chaos and misery thanks to American bellicosity, from Libya to Iraq and beyond. But the US never looks back in regret at any of its multiple forays, not even a few years back.
To be sure the American Empire, which has seldom seen a year without pillage of another nation or region, is now facing its greatest nemesis. Unheeded lessons of the past have made it thoroughly inoculated to its own demise. In short, it is drunk on its hubris and unable to grapple with its inevitable descent. Climate change is ravaging the heartland with crops inundated from Iowa to Nebraska. The fire season in the west has become a never ending, year round event. Miami and much of Florida will eventually be flooded beyond economic viability, with New York, Houston and several other coastal cities to follow. How soon will troops be deployed in the heartland or on flooded, climate change ravaged streets? But alas, the American ruling class will continue to shew away the screeching canaries. They will cast the calamities and catastrophes as “opportunities” as Pompeo incredulously did in a speech about the rapidly melting Arctic.
American Empire knows no other language sans brutality, deceit and belligerence. It is rapidly militarizing our collective climate catastrophe and shoring up ways to secure its dominance and control of waning resources. As in every other war the Empire has launched, the coming ones will be drenched in lies. It will be to save the planet or the “future.” But like every other war it will be waged against the poorest of the earth, those whose carbon footprint is microscopic compared with the wealthy few. The global south whose presence is everywhere and yet rendered largely invisible. But these unheard voices are being viewed increasingly as a threat to a pure white world of plenty, and their dehumanization might undoubtedly lend itself to atrocities and genocide not ever seen before.
The American Empire, one of the shortest lived in human history, has become the biggest threat to humanity and the living biosphere itself. Its industries rape the soil and defile the water. Its military tortures and slaughters the poorest people and decimates the most vulnerable of species. And its corporate media inundates the collective psyche with propaganda and spectacle. It demolishes democratic movements at their onset and installs puppet leaders who do its bidding by starving or stealing from their own people. And it does all of this with impunity.
But like all empires it will eventually fall. Its endless and costly wars on behalf of capital investments and profiteering are contributing to that demise. After all, billions of dollars are spent to keep the bloated military industrial complex afloat in service to the ruling class while social and economic safety nets are torn to shreds. It is now building a $100 million dollar drone base in Africa and is still the owner of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal. A society can only do this for so long before it collapses, and with climate change catastrophe on the horizon this game the Empire is playing will be sure to crash big and in a global manner. We can only hope that when it does there will be something left worth salvaging from the ruins of the earth it has so brutally laid siege to.
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