Ideas like Medicare for All are written off as fantasy thinking by the same people who support virtually unlimited military spending.
“In times when we’re told that there’s not enough money, Republicans and corporate Democrats seem to find the cash to fund a $1.1 trillion fighter jet program or a $1.7 trillion nuclear weapon ‘modernization’ program,” she says.
A US Marine Corps F-35B drops a laser-guided bomb during a test at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
Ever since the word “socialism” made its way into the US political mainstream two years ago in the guise of a wispy-haired gentleman from Vermont, progressives have been learning to expand their vision of what’s possible, from the swift adoption of “Medicare for All” to the even swifter mainstreaming of “Abolish ICE.” But for those wanting to really swing for the fences, it’s time to consider another issue sitting alongside these on the platform of rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
It’s not an issue you’ll see on the nation’s front pages, and it’s one that promises an even deeper departure from today’s political orthodoxy in both parties: She calls it a “peace economy.”
“In times when we’re told that there’s not enough money, Republicans and corporate Democrats seem to find the cash to fund a $1.1 trillion fighter jet program or a $1.7 trillion nuclear weapon ‘modernization’ program,” she says.
She’s right — and while her opponents constantly dismiss calls for universal health care or free college as pie-in-the-sky demands disconnected from economic reality, they are strangely quiet on the most extreme form of wasteful spending embraced by both Democrats and Republicans.
American taxpayers have so far sunk $5.6 trillion into the war on terror with almost nothing to show for it — and no end in sight. Current military spending is still higher than at any time since World War II. Majorities in both parties have been guilty of starving domestic needs to fund battles we never should have begun.
When Donald Trump lashed out at our NATO allies for not spending enough money on defense, he unintentionally highlighted just how expensive the US’s military spending addiction really is. If we trimmed our defense budget down to the 2% of GDP that Trump demanded of the NATO countries, it would free up about $3 trillion over the next decade, as the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein noted.
What Ocasio-Cortez understands is that never-ending war, in her words, “damages America’s legitimacy as a force for good, creates new generations of potential terrorists, and erodes American prosperity.” There is a direct connection between claims that we cannot afford something like Medicare for All — despite similar systems existing across virtually all of the developed world — and our dangerous addiction to military intervention across the globe.
NATO officials insist collective defense is ‘unconditional and iron-clad’
In a Tuesday night interview, President Trump once again stirred up fury among NATO nations, this time by questioning the wisdom of the alliance’s collective defense terms. He warned this was potentially risky because any small NATO member could quickly escalate the entire alliance into a world war.
This is of course true, and not just of Montenegro, but literally any of NATO’s member nations. While Trump’s terming of Montenegrins as “very aggressive people”didn’t sit well with many, the potential for one smaller NATO member nation to provoke a war is not some new concern, but a frequent criticism of the NATO model for decades.
NATO officials were quick to criticize Trump, saying that NATO’s Article 5 provision for collective defense is “unconditional and iron-clad.” This only adds to concerns among NATO nations that Trump’s commitment to the alliance is by their standards imperfect.
NATO officials were already unhappy with Trump going into last week’s summit, and more so coming out of it. The latest comments are a reminder that the threat of World War 3 remains a serious concern for the US president, and one not easily dispelled.
Montenegrin officials were quick to fire back that they don’t intend to start any wars. Again, this misses the serious concerns of the alliance’s obligations, as NATO has no shortage of members liable to pick fights and then come running to the alliance for “defense.”
It’s not even just the current members of NATO. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has voted to express its support for “all” nations to join NATO if they want to. This means effectively any nation in the world with an axe to grind might join NATO with an eye toward using the alliance as its backup.
Trump is right in recognizing the dangers of NATO collective defense, something previous presidents have been loathe to publicly discuss. Yet in doing so he’s once again riled up angered foreign officials who didn’t like him in the first place.
All them mouth breathers, politicians, armchair pundits (cowards), and lame fake media talking heads, are darned lucky they don’t live in a real dictatorship, as their heads would be rolling down the ditches by the sewers. Pathetic warmongers. Oh wow, Trump wants peace with Russia. What the hell has Russia done to the USA? Or the world? Turds.
“Except for those holding an obviously sane point of view, all the people you see below, journos, pundits, “security experts”, former spooks, comedians, and so on are all guilty of complicity in inciting unnecessary war, a high crime that the Nuremberg tribunal regarded as a capital offense.”
The title of this analysis by Paul Craig Roberts (see excerpts below) sums up the key question defining the historical juncture in America today, as two wings of the equally corrupt US ruling establishment battle it out, one slightly less depraved than the other. For while a sizable section of working class America embraces Trump wrongly thinking him its champion, and legions of terminally and utterly indoctrinated stupid liberals cheerfully jump into bed with the CIA and the military to consummate a wedding in blood, the country drifts ever closer to the abyss. Meanwhile, in both the short-term and the middle-term, there’s little question that those pushing Trump toward further hostilities and even war with Russia (or else!) are technically insane. Charitably put Trump does not have a surfeit of admirable qualities, but this much is true: he’s the only one around on the top political tier of America who, for whatever reasons, remains stubbornly committed to the idea of normalizing relations with Russia. Considering what a modern nuclear war would do to this tormented planet, and the moral decomposition of the US political class, that is obviously a good and sensible notion worthy of support, not hysterical denunciation as the CIA assets in the media and innumerable establishment minions are currently doing. Beggars can’t be choosers, quite literally in this case. But none of this reasoning seems to penetrate the skulls of the Deep State handlers and their countless shills. Class imperatives I suppose. Have any of these idiots, presstitutes, and sociopaths ever thought through the implications of their single-minded pursuit of confrontation with Russia or any other nuclear power perceived as an obstacle to America’s dream of uncontested world hegemony? The emperor was never more pathetically naked than at this critical hour, and yet, because the majority of Americans—easily the most heavily and successfully propagandized people in history— remain confused and massively ignorant of the most essential truths, the emerging potential for the creation of a new and much healthier world order may simply slip through our fingers. —PG
Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia? The Democrats say he is By Paul Craig Roberts
The US Democratic Party is determined to take the world to thermo-nuclear war rather than to admit that Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election fair and square. The Democratic Party was totally corrupted by the Clinton Regime, and now it is totally insane. Leaders of the Democratic Party, such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, my former co-author in the New York Times, have responded in a non-Democratic way to the first step President Trump has taken to reduce the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia that the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes created between the two superpowers.
Yes, Russia is a superpower. Russian weapons are so superior to the junk produced by the waste-filled US military/security complex that lives high off the hog on the insouciant American taxpayer that it is questionable if the US is even a second class military power. If the insane neoconservatives, such as Max Boot, William Kristol, and the rest of the neocon scum get their way, the US, the UK, and Europe will be a radioactive ruin for thousands of years.
Pelosi: Making peace is a crime in her book.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (CA), Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives, declared that out of fear of some undefined retribution from Putin, a dossier on Trump perhaps, the President of the United States sold out the American people to Russia because he wants to make peace: “It begs the question, what does Vladimir Putin, what do the Russians have on Donald Trump—personally, politically and financially that he should behave in such a manner?” The “such a manner” Pelosi is speaking about is making peace instead of war.
To be clear, the Democratic Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives has accused Donald Trump of high treason against the United States. There is no outcry against this blatantly false accusation, totally devoid of evidence. The presstitute media instead of protesting this attempt at a coup against the President of the United States, trumpet the accusation as self-evident truth.Trump is a traitor because he wants peace with Russia.
Here is Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (NY) repeating Pelosi’s false accusation: “Millions of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous behavior is the possibility that President Putin holds damaging information over President Trump.” If you don’t believe that this is orchestrated between Pelosi and Schumer, you are stupid beyond belief.
Both Trump and Putin …can be assassinated, and that is what the statements from Pelosi, Schumer, McCain, Lindsey Graham, et. al., repeated endlessly in the propaganda ministry that is the Western press, encourages. Trump can be assassinated or overthrown in a political coup for selling out America to Russia, as members of both political parties claim and as the media trumpets endlessly.
Here is disgraced Obama CIA director John Brennan, a leader of the fake Russiagate campaign against President Trump in order to prevent Trump from making peace with Russia and, thus, by making the world safer, threatening the massive, unjustified budget of the military/security complex: “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”Here are many more: https://www.infowars.com/meltdown-left-seething-over-trump-putin-summit/
NOTICE THAT NOT ONE WESTERN MEDIA SOURCE IS CELEBRATING AND THANKING TRUMP AND PUTIN FOR EASING THE ARTIFICAILLY CREATED TENSIONS THAT WERE LEADING TO NUCLEAR WAR. HOW CAN THIS BE? HOW CAN IT BE THAT THE WESTERN MEDIA IS SO OPPOSED TO PEACE? WHAT IS THE EXPLANATION?
The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans, as well as the rest of the world, desperately need to notice the extremely hostile reaction to peace on the part of the US Democratic Party, many members of the Republican Party, including the despicable US Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the Western Presstitute Media, a collection of people on the CIA payroll according to the German newspaper editor, Udo Ulfkotte, and the CIA itself.
Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of the corrupt filth that rules over us are all in the pay of the military/security complex. Just go and investigate the donations to their re-election campaigns. The 1,000 billion dollar budget of the military/security complex, amplified by the CIA’s front corporations and narcotics business, provides enormous sums with which to purchase the senators and representatives that the insouciant American voters think that they elect.
Today, right now, at this moment, we are faced with a massive effort of the military/security complex, the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, and the presstitute media to discredit the elected President of the United States and to overthrow him in order that the utterly corrupt elite that rule American can continue to hold on to power and to protect the massive budget of the military/security complex that, along with the Israel Lobby, funds the elections of those who rule us.
Do you know how large 1,000 billion is? You would have to live for thousands of years and do nothing for 24/7 except count to reach that figure. It is a sum that nurtures the recipients, and the recipients regard it as worth protecting.Therefore, the American public gets not representation, but lies that justify war and conflict. The military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned the American people to no effect, is in desperate need of an enemy. In obedience to the military/security complex, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have made Russia that enemy. If Trump and Putin do not understand this, they will easily be made irrelevant.
They both can be assassinated, and that is what the statements from Pelosi, Schumer, McCain, Lindsey Graham, et. al., repeated endlessly in the propaganda ministry that is the Western press, encourages. Trump can be assassinated or overthrown in a political coup for selling out America to Russia, as members of both political parties claim and as the media trumpets endlessly. Putin can be easily assassinated by the CIA operatives that the Russian government stupidly permits to operate throughout Russia in NGOs and Western/US owned media and among the Atlanticist Integrationists, Washington’s Firth Column inside Russia serving Washington’s purposes. These Russian traitors serve in Putin’s own government!
Americans are so unaware that they have no idea of the risk that President Trump is taking by challenging the US military security complex.
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My emergence from The Matrix began with Strom Thurmond’s pat on my shoulder. It grew with my time at the Wall Street Journal when I learned that some truthful things simply could not be said. In the Treasury I experienced how those outside interests opposed to a president’s policy marshall their forces and the media that they own to block it. Later as a member of a secret presidential committee, I saw how the CIA attempted to prevent President Reagan from ending the Cold War.Today, right now, at this moment, we are faced with a massive effort of the military/security complex, the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, and the presstitute media to discredit the elected President of the United States and to overthrow him in order that the utterly corrupt elite that rule American can continue to hold on to power and to protect the massive budget of the military/security complex that, along with the Israel Lobby, funds the elections of those who rule us. Trump, like Reagan, was an exception, and it is the exceptions that accumulate the ire of the corrupt leftwing, bought off with money, and the ire of the media, concentrated into small tight ownership groups indebted to those who permitted the illegal concentration of a once independent and diverse American media that once served, on occasion, as a watchdog over government. The rightwing, wrapped in the flag, dismisses all truth as “anti-American.”
If Putin, Lavrov, the Russian government, the traitorous Russian Fifth Column—the Atlanticist Integrationists—the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans think that any peace or consideration can come out of America, they are insane. Their delusions are setting themselves up for destruction. There is no institution in America, government or private, that can be trusted. Any government or person who trusts America or any Western country is stupid beyond belief.
The entire Russiagate hoax is an orchestration by the military/security complex, led by John Brennan, Comey, and Rosenstein. The purpose is to discredit President trump for two reasons. One is to prevent any normalization of relations with Russia. The other is to remove Trump’s agenda as an alternative to the agenda of the Democratic Party.
President Trump is almost powerless. Putin, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans should recognize this before it is too late for them. President Trump cannot fire and arrest for high treason Mueller and Rosenstein. And Trump cannot indict Hillary for her numerous unquestionable crimes in plain view of everyone, or Comey or Brennan, who declares Trump “to be wholly in the pocket of Putin,” for trying to overthrow the elected president of the United States. Trump cannot have the Secret Service question the likes of Pelosi and Schumer and McCain and Lindsey Graham for false accusations that encourage assassination of the President of the United States.
Trump cannot even trust the Secret Service, which accumulated evidence suggests was complicit in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.
If Putin and Lavrov, so anxious to be friends of Washington, let their guards down, they are history.
As I said above, Russiagate is an orchestratration to prevent peace between the US and Russia. Leading military/security complex experts, including the person who provided the CIA’s daily briefing of the President of the United States for many years, and the person who devised the spy program for the National Security Agency, have proven conclusively that Russiagate is a hoax designed for the purpose of preventing President Trump from normalizing relations between the US and Russia, which has the power to destroy the entirety of the Western World at will.
Keep in mind that no media informs you better than my website. If my website goes down, you will be left in darkness. No valid information comes from the US government or the Western presstitutes. If you sit in front of the TV screen watching the Western media, you are brainwashed beyond all hope. Not even I can rescue you. Nor God himself.
Americans, and indeed the Russians themselves, are incapable of realizing it, but there is a chance that Trump will be overthrown and a Western assault will be launched against the handful of countries that insist on sovereignty.
I doubt that few of the Americans who elected Trump will be taken in by the anti-Trump propaganda, but they are not organized and have no armed power. The police, militarized by George W. Bush and Obama, will be set against them. The rebellions will be local and suppressed by every violation of the US Constitution by the private powers that rule Washington, as always has been the case with rebellions in America.
In the West, which the Russians are so anxious to join, all freedoms are dead—freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom of privacy, freedom from arbitrary search, freedom from arbitrary arrest, along with the Constitutional protections of due process and habeas corpus. Today there are no countries less free than the United States of America.
Why do the Russian Atlanticist Integrationists want to join an unfree Western world? Are they that brainwashed by Western Propaganda?
If Putin listens to these deluded fools, Putin will destroy Russia.
There is something wrong with Russian perception of Washington. Apparently the Russian elite, with the exception of Shoigu and a few others are incapable of comprehending the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony and the neoconservative determination to destroy Russia as a constraint on US unilateralism. The Russian government somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, believes that Washington’s hegemony is negotiable.
BONUS The Great Helsinki Summit Toxic fallout
A sampler of reactions to the summit. Except for those holding an obviously sane point of view, all the people you see below, journos, pundits, “security experts”, former spooks, comedians, and so on are all guilty of complicity in inciting unnecessary war, a high crime that the Nuremberg tribunal regarded as a capital offense.
Wherein from pundits and politicos to not-so-funny comics, the russophobic establishment unleashes its fury in a storm of lies (the usual ones), served this time around with a fitting dressing of anger and frustration at an event that they sense may mean trouble for their project of endless wars and further immiseration of people everywhere. Not that Trump is not also for immiseration or devastating the ecology and so on, but he is at least not for nuclear war. If that means nothing to you, then stop reading. We’re dealing with a rotten, squalid, options-poor situation, because the American people failed to do their homework to stop the system’s degeneration into the toxic cesspit it is now, obvious to all except the most addled-brained amongst us.
On CNN, a well known fake news never trumper outlet: Wolf Blitzer grills Rand Paul
CNN has been sowing enmity between the superpowers for a long time. This sordid interview took place in December of 2017, see how fresh it sounds.
Colbert says Trump’s meeting with Putin should count as ‘treason’
The below is obviously despicable, but par for the course for cynical careerist disinformer Stephen Colbert, prominent ner trumper and Democrat party celebrity, who parades around as some sort of funnyman. Look at the people he hails as heroes, CIA’s James Clapper, John McCain, and so on, to great applause by his conditioned audience. While conveniently forgetting what this summit was all about. The moral bankruptcy of liberals was never so transparent as this.
The Scourge of US Exceptionalism at work Connoisseurs of disinformation will have a ball with this one. Here’s one of the most egregious pieces of news distortion on the summit, served up by CNN’s Chris Cuomo, using as his sounding board Leon Panetta, an old establishment warhorse who naturally sees the world through the opposite side of the reality funnel. Literally everything he says, at Cuomo’s frenzied urging, is a lie and a clear demonstration of the power of US exceptionalism, the emotional and intellectual cancer at the core of the American nation.
Below, this is what passes for journalism in America. Journos like Fox’s Chris Wallace—at best mental and cultural mediocrities— secure an interview with a world historical figure like Putin and go on to boast about it for the rest of their lives, when all they did was put questions carefully scripted by their handlers, in this case with the highly likely assist of the most sordid channels of the US spook establishment. Notice that this media worm has the audacity to present Putin (surely a high point of courage in his book) with a copy of the Mueller bullshit indictment. What is truly amazing is that Putin manages to remain civil despite such thinly veiled provocations. Too bad the true drama here is lost on 95% of the American audience, as, thanks to the thick crust of exceptionalism covering their brains, they have no clues as to the context of anything happening before their eyes.
PCR with feline children.
About the Author
Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format. His latest book is The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
The West’s “Regime Change” war against the legitimate government in Syria, based upon fake humanitarian pretexts, is a war of Supreme International War Crimes, packed in lies and deceptions.
Mark Taliano and Tate Ulsaker unpack the lies and point at our complicity on “Truthseeker’s Path”.
As Christians in the West, through our political passivity and quiescence, we are offering tacit consent to terrorists in Syria who slaughter and ethnically cleanse Christians — in the land which gave birth to Christianity.
Beneath the lie of “freedom and democracy”, we are giving consent to undemocratic terrorist mercenaries who are and have been destroying Syria – against the will of Syrians. We are giving consent to chaos, totalitarianism, and fundamentalist, distorted interpretations of Sharia Law.
Under the false pretext of a “War on Terror” we are supporting ISIS and al Qaeda.
In the name of “helping refugees”, we are creating refugees.
We are impoverishing ourselves, and the entire world, by supporting the War Machine.
The policymakers who have successfully fabricated consent for their megalomaniacal and criminal ventures are hollow men and women, empty shells. And we are duty bound to resist.
Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.
We spotted him at the end of a path beside the River Miljacka, bending over the rail with a fishing rod, staring at the fast-moving, shallow waters with a rare intensity, frowning – angry, I thought – the sort of guy you might avoid if you weren’t a journalist on a glowering, rain-spitting day, walking with a translator and ready to approach the down-and-outs of this gloomy city.
I’ve never found Sarajevo a cheerful place, not just because it endured the longest siege in modern history, but because its new tourist shops and tat, and its dodgy reputation as a restored symbol of ethnic unity, are undeserved. Besides, it sent my own father to the trenches of the First World War. It lives off that, too, turning political assassination – in this case, of course, that of the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince and his wife in June 1914 – into a holiday haunt. Come and see where Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shot. There’s a museum on the corner and a spanking new four star hotel on the same street and just round the block a Lebanese restaurant – I kid thee not – called “Beirut”.
The fisherman, when I found him, was standing just across the river, scarcely fifty metres from the spot where Princip shot Franz Ferdinand in the jugular and Sophie in the abdomen a hundred and four years ago. And the fisherman’s story, too – obliquely – was a tale of murder most foul. He talked in snatches and his face was congealed into a mask of fury and contempt. He was 57, he said, but he looked at least ten years older, nearer seventy. Was he here in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, I asked?
He turned on me contemptuously. “I was in the war since 1991. I was with ‘Caco’, fighting the JNA. Caco was a good man. He was not what they’re saying he was. I could talk to you for days and days. He was killed by the ‘Seve’.”
In Bosnia, when you hear that a dead man was a good man, it can often mean something rather different. And like all Bosnian stories, this one needs a gloss. In 1991, Bosnian Muslims fought, for a while, alongside Croats against the Yugoslav National Army (the JNA) which was trying to preserve a Serb-dominated nation out of old Yugoslavia. But “Caco” – you pronounce it “Tsatso” in what we used to call the Serbo-Croatian language and which here we must now call Bosniak – was a vicious war criminal in the siege of Sarajevo until his violent death in 1993. And the fisherman says he fought with him.
In fact, Brigadier Musan “Caco” Topalovic, the “good man” of our fisherman’s story, was the head of the Bosnian Army’s 10th Mountain Brigade who turned his military career into a campaign of extortion, hostage-taking, large-scale rape and mass murder of both Serbs and Muslims in besieged Sarajevo, proving, alas, that Muslim could kill Muslim while fighting the Serbs. He was eventually put to death by an almost equally ruthless Bosnian paramilitary police force called “Seve” – it means “larks” in Bosniak, those nice friendly birds about which poets write – which was loyal to the Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic.
In a final battle, nine of the “Seve” cops were murdered – one had his eyes put out, another was disemboweled – and Caco surrendered after a total of 18 people, half of them civilian hostages, were killed. Caco himself was then “shot while trying to escape”; in reality, he was almost certainly executed by the father of the “lark” who was disemboweled. Caco was buried in an anonymous grave – but later still, he was exhumed to lie in a “veterans” cemetery among heroes who deserved better than to share their last resting place with a war criminal.
The fisherman of Sarajevo speaks to Robert Fisk beside the Miljacka river of wars past and future (Nelofer Pazira)
Our fisherman did not choose to elaborate his services for Caco, but when I asked him who won the Bosnian war, he spat out the reply: “They won! Look what they are doing to the veterans. Look, we were fighting Croats, Croats were fighting us, and we together were fighting Serbs – and the politicians are now just making deals. This is going to end up with us all fighting each other, Muslims versus Muslims, Croats against Croats, Serbs against Serbs. You see how things are developing?” – and here he pointed in the direction of the parliament building – “In the end we will have a real civil war, worse than the one we had.”
Veterans like our fisherman are angry because parliament is planning to pass an increase in benefit pensions to “veterans” of the war, without much proof of how many real veterans there are or what they did in the conflict. And some of those veterans fought each other. Who gets the most? Things are not made better for the fisherman by the fact that Bakir Izetbegovic, the son of the late Alija Izetbegovic – the former president whose “larks” did for Caco – is now in the revolving presidency of modern Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as president of the Party of Democratic Action.
Bosnia itself is still so divided that when the federal police tried to move a thousand Syrian, Afghan and other refugees from Sarajevo to Mostar during Turkish President Erdogan’s visit, the Mostar police blocked the Sarajevo government police from bringing the refugee convoy south.
Well, the fisherman wanted to talk no more. He was staying, he said, up in the hills above Sarajevo, in the area where Serbs used to live until the end of the war, and he sleeps in the home of his brother and his brother’s wife and family. He was obviously a lonely man, and he scampered away from us along the old quay a few seconds later, holding his fishing rod in his arms.
Strange, though, that while there are some lakes elsewhere in the river, there are – as everyone here knows – no fish in the Miljacka as it flows through Sarajevo, past the spot where Princip shot the Archduke more than a century ago and where the fisherman was “fishing” on that rainy day this week.
When you think of addiction in America today, one thing comes to mind: the opioid epidemic. And it should. It’s serious. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, almost 64,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in 2016 (more than died in the Vietnam War), an average of 175 people a day. In that year, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimated that 11.5 million Americans “misused” pain medication. (Note that such figures are still on the rise.) Only recently, the surgeon general issued a rare national advisory “urging more Americans to carry naloxone, a drug used to revive people overdosing on opioids.” This crisis of addiction has already cost the country an estimated $1 trillion since 2001 and might, in the next three years alone, cost more than half that much again.
The United States, however, has two other crises that, in the long run, will cost Americans far more. Yet they get remarkably little attention as addiction phenomena. The first is so obvious that no one should have to comment on it. Here’s the strange thing, though: it’s a rare moment when there’s any serious analysis of it or real attention given to it as an addiction.
This country (and above all its media) is addicted to Donald J. Trump in a way that no population, no media, possibly not even the Communist Chinese press in the days of Mao Zedong, ever was to any figure. Since he rode that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015 to the tune of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” and took out after Mexican “rapists” and future Great Walls, no one — nothing — has ever been covered or attended to this way, online or off, in daily life or in our increasingly shared, increasingly addictive media life. (Yes, the Internet and social media are undoubtedly addictions of some sort, too, but let’s not head down that road or I’ll never stop writing!)
Not Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, nor his tax “reform” gift to the 1%, nor his chance to appoint a second Supreme Court justice (with more openings likely to come) — none of these or anything else he’s done or is likely to do will qualify as the truest, deepest, most far-reaching of his triumphs. That can only be the unprecedented way he continues to draw attention. It represents a victory of the first order for him of a unique, almost incomprehensible sort, made more so by the inability of those who report on him to take in what’s happened to them or analyze their situation in any serious way.
Addicted to Trump
Donald J. Trump, as candidate and president, has trumped the attention span of this country, possibly of the planet. Eyes have been focused on him, his insults, his tweets, his passing thoughts, his every comment, his acts, major and minor, and the associated acts and reactions of those who circle around him, as never before in history — not for a king, an emperor, or a dictator, and certainly not for a president. His truest triumph has been to make himself into the voluntary drug of choice for most of a country and all of the media in a way we’ve never imagined possible, and for which, it seems, there is no naloxone.
He has, in the deepest sense, turned the media he loves to loathe, thrives on hating, into a genuine mechanism for producing “fake news” — about him. It’s only real news if you think that The Donald should be the focus of essentially everything, if you believe that nothing else on this planet should take place except refracted through him.
When it comes to the media in particular, Donald Trump is the opioid crisis. He’s their drug of choice. He gets them high. They can’t help themselves, nor can they stop. As head of CBS Leslie Moonves put it during election campaign 2016: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” And then he added, “The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this [is] going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
And it’s never ended. The president glues eyeballs to papers, to the endlessly talking heads on the cable news networks, to Twitter, to anything that now passes for media, at a time when so many news outfits are in so many other ways coming unglued. More reporters have undoubtedly been assigned to cover him and his acolytes than ever covered anything or anyone else on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis. Every day of Donald Trump’s life is, in coverage terms, something like the equivalent of the Kennedy assassination, which might be thought of as the first 24/7 TV event, or perhaps the 1994 O.J. Simpson white Ford Bronco car chase that was, in some strange way, a preview of this Trumpian media moment.
It really doesn’t matter much what the “story” is when it comes to his presidency. Whatever it is, it’s promptly swarmed by that media without the slightest sense of proportion or any feeling for what actually matters on this planet of ours. In almost every sense, in fact, Donald Trump now regularly blots out the sun.
Take a small incident just over two weeks ago. With a party of family members, Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stopped off at the Red Hen, a tiny farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. Mid-meal, she was asked to leave by the owner after staff members raised “concerns.” I’m only reminding you of this — a couple of weeks ago you undoubtedly could have told me every detail — because it’s already been consigned to the dust bin of history as other Trump-infused tales — from the resignation of Supreme Court justice Kennedy to prank-calling the president — have swept it aside. Of course, Sanders’s half-eaten dinner also helped sweep aside previous stories of our time like that message on the back of Melania Trump’s coat on her first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border (“I really don’t care. Do U?”).
When Sanders left that restaurant and then tweeted about it, a storm of coverage, as well as a firestorm of tweets, Facebook posts, insults, and praise about the judgment of the restaurant’s owner, arguments over the ideological polarization of the country, and so much else, including the “weaponization” of the restaurant-review website Yelp, flooded over us. Unrelated restaurants with “Red Hen” in their name elsewhere in the country (or even the world) received threats of all sorts and were inundated with insulting messages as were shops and restaurants that happened to be located near the actual Red Hen.
The story became front-page news nationwide and, for instance, led NBC Nightly News(which I happened to watch) on the evening that the stock market swooned over trade-war fears. In my own hometown paper, the New York Times, it was a front-page story and not one but two reporters were assigned to a crucial sideline piece about why President Trump’s Twitter finger was so slow; why, that is, he waited 48 hours — two full days! — before tweeting his support for his press secretary by attacking the Red Hen for having a “filthy” exterior and undoubtedly being “dirty” inside. The Times journalists focused on “the president’s uncharacteristically tepid, delayed response,” wondering whether it was a sign that Sanders was on her way out. (The Washington Post, on the other hand, dissected the president’s response in terms of, as the headline on one of its articles put it, “everything Trump got wrong about Red Hen, in one tweet.”) And so it went.
Tell me, then, if this isn’t an addiction, what is it? And what’s the one thing you know about addictions? Whatever high they give you — and let’s not deny that Donald Trump offers us a constant set of highs (whether as rushes of agreement and pleasure or horror and dismay) — if you can’t stop yourself from taking the drug, day after day, night after night, there will be a price to pay. Somebody better have the equivalent of naloxone on hand.
Addicted to War
And then there’s that other twenty-first-century all-American addiction, in some ways far stranger than the Trumpian one and likely to be no less costly in the long run: addiction to war. Almost 17 years after the Global War on Terror was launched, the highs — the invasion of Afghanistan! The taking of Kabul! The smashing of Iraq! The capture of Saddam Hussein! — are long gone. Now exhausted and discouraged, those hooked nonetheless remain unable to stop.
In some ways, ddiction may seem like a strange category when applied to this country’s war-making, as for most Americans the very opposite seems to be true. Since a series of historic global antiwar protests faded out with the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, it’s as if most Americans had gone cold turkey on this country’s credit-card wars. Willfully demobilized by the top officials of the Bush administration, who preferred to conduct their military operations without citizen or congressional oversight, they simply turned away and went about their business. Meanwhile, America’s all-volunteer military, increasingly a kind of foreign legion for much of the population, has continued to fight never-endingly and remarkably fruitlessly across a vast swath of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
The divorce of most Americans from Washington’s wars and those fighting them may be less than apparent because, according to the polls, the public has a kind of blind trust and soaring “confidence” in the U.S. military, unlike any other part of the government or, for that matter, the society, and because the urge to “thank” the “warriors” is now such a basic part of American life. But all of that is, I suspect, little more than a massive compensation reaction from a public that otherwise could not care less.
When it comes to Washington’s still-spreading war on terror, the media has, if anything, followed suit. Recently, for instance, Reuters correspondent Indrees Ali posted a photo on Twitter of a large, almost empty room filled with chairs, with the caption: “There are exactly four journalists at the Pentagon briefing on Afghanistan.” That single image sums up the present situation vividly. Almost 17 years after the invasion of Afghanistan by a military repeatedly hailed as “the finest fighting force the world has ever known,” at a moment when Taliban insurgents are again gaining ground, a Pentagon briefing on developments there is of no interest. Yes, events in such wars are still dutifully reported from time to time, but those reports, often tucked away on the inside pages of papers or deep in the nightly news, don’t hold a candle to Melania’s jacket, the president’s latest tweet, or a Red Hen rebuff.
And yet the photo of that Pentagon briefing is deceptive. It leaves out a key group still in the room: those addicted to an American style of war-making through which, year after year, the still-theoretically dominant power on the planet only seems to induce the spread of terror movements, disorder, destruction, and the displacement of increasingly large populations (contributing to a global refugee crisis that is, in its own way, helping to remake the planet).
Missing from that photo are the characters who have OD’d on U.S. military power and yet can’t stop mainlining it in ways that have become all-too-familiar since 2001. I’m thinking of the generals of the U.S. military, the men who have led an endless set of campaigns as part of what those inside the Pentagon are now grimly referring to as an “infinite war” leading nowhere. And they’re strung out. As Mark Perry reported recently in Foreign Policy, Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis and other American generals, unlike the president’s new civilian counselors, National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, are not eager for the next potential war, the one with Iran that already looms on the horizon. They understand that they could launch such a conflict successfully, destroying much of Iran’s military (and its nuclear facilities), and still, as with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and so on, somehow not get out.
And yet, much as they don’t want a bright, shiny new war (and who could blame them under the circumstances), they can’t imagine leaving the old ones behind either. And that’s America’s war addiction in a nutshell, one that has long had in its grip most of elite Washington and the rest of a national security state set up around a style of infinite-war-making that must always be fed with ever increasing numbers of taxpayer dollars. Thanks to those dollars, we, the taxpayers, could be thought of as so many street-level drug peddlers in this country’s war equivalent of the opioid epidemic. The politicians who feed those dollars into the military maw would be the doctors who prescribe opioids, understanding full-well their ability to hook patients. And the Military-Industrial Complex — the giant weapons companies and the warrior corporations that now go into action in lock-step with that military — would be the drug companies that have profited so off the opioid crisis even as they stoked it.
Returning momentarily to Donald Trump, you can feel the power of that war addiction in his inability to fulfill his promise to fight those conflicts in a winning style and, if necessary, quickly extricate the country from what he termed its “$7 trillion” Greater Middle Eastern disaster. In his own fashion, he, too, has been hooked. And when the increasingly tired and distraught generals he chose to surround himself with provedunpalatable to him, Trump notably picked as replacements civilians guaranteed to keep the ball rolling when it came to America’s wars from hell.
So, addiction? If you don’t think this country has an addiction crisis (other than opioids), think again.
The summit meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military alliance that is expanding its deployments of troops, combat and surveillance aircraft and missile ships around Russia’s borders, took place on July 11-12 and was a farce, with Trump behaving in his usual way, insulting individuals and nations with characteristic vulgarity.
Before the jamboree, NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg (one of those selected for a Trumpian harangue), recounted in a speech on 21 June that “NATO has totally transformed our presence in Afghanistan from a big combat operation with more than 100,000 to now 16,000 troops conducting training, assisting and advising.” But then he had a bit of a rethink when he was asked a question about whether NATO had learnt any lessons that might make it think about “intervening in the future.” To give him his due, Stoltenberg replied that he thought “one of the lessons we have learned from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from Libya, is that military intervention is not always solving all problems.”
He is absolutely right about that, because the US-NATO military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have been catastrophic.
It is intriguing that NATO’s secretary general can at last admit that military muscle doesn’t solve every problem, but he did not expand on the subject of Libya, which unhappy country was destroyed by US-NATO military intervention in 2011, and it is interesting to reflect on that particular NATO debacle, because it led directly to expansion of the Islamic State terrorist group, a prolonged civil war, a vast number of deaths, and hideous suffering by desperate refugees trying to flee from Libya across the Mediterranean.
Towards the end of the West’s seven-month blitz on Libya its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was murdered by gangs supported by US-NATO, which caused the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to giggle “We came; we saw; he died” in an interview on CBS, which was a good indicator of how the peace-loving West approached its devastation of a country whose president had plenty of flaws but whose main mistake was to threaten to nationalize his country’s oil resources, which were in the hands of US and European oligarchs.
Gaddafi was a despot who persecuted his enemies quite as savagely as the Western-supported dictator Hosni Mubarak in neighboring Egypt, but life for most Libyans was comfortable, and the BBC had to admit that Gaddafi’s “particular form of socialism does provide free education, healthcare and subsidized housing and transport,” although “wages are extremely low and the wealth of the state and profits from foreign investments have only benefited a narrow elite” (which doesn’t happen anywhere else, of course). The CIA World Factbook noted that in 2010 Gaddafi’s Libya had a literacy rate of 82.6% (far better than Egypt, India and Saudi Arabia), and a life expectancy of 77.47 years, higher than 160 of the 215 countries assessed. But the West was intent on getting rid of Gaddafi, and managed to fudge a UN Resolution to begin the war. (Germany, under the wise leadership of Angela Merkel, refused to have anything to do with the long-planned carnival of rocketing and bombing.)
Gaddafi was murdered on October 20, 2011, in particularly disgusting circumstances, and ten days later the US-NATO alliance ended its blitzkrieg. The normally sane Guardian newspaper of the UK reported that the operation had demonstrated “a unique combination of military power that could set a model for future warfare” while the secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, proclaimed the end of “a successful chapter in Nato’s history.”
The “successful chapter” involved 9,600 airstrikes that amongst other destruction “debilitated Libya’s water supply by targeting critical state-owned water installations, including a water-pipe factory . . that manufactured pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes for the Great Manmade River project, an ingenious irrigation system transporting water from aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert to about 70% of the population.” As the Christian Science Monitor reported in 2010, “the Great Man-Made River, which is leader Muammar Qaddafi’s ambitious answer to the country’s water problems, irrigates Libya’s large desert farms. The 2,333-mile network of pipes ferry water from four major underground aquifers in southern Libya to the northern population centers. Wells punctuate the water’s path, allowing farmers to utilize the water network in their fields.” Not any more, they don’t, and there is now a critical water shortage
One recent observation was that “The water crisis is a powerful symbol of state failure in a country that was once one of the wealthiest in the Middle East but has been gripped by turmoil since a 2011 uprising unseated [sic] Muammar Gaddafi. For Libyans the chaos has meant power cuts and crippling cash shortages. These are often made worse by battles between armed groups vying for control of the fractured oil-rich state and its poorly-maintained infrastructure.” Thank you, US-NATO, for liberating Libya.
Two prominent figures involved in the US-NATO war on Libya were Ivo Daalder, the US Representative on the NATO Council from 2009 to 2013, and Admiral James G (‘Zorba’) Stavridis, the US Supreme Allied Commander Europe (the military commander of NATO) in the same period. As they ended their war, on October 31, 2011, these two ninnies had a piece published in the New York Times in which they made the absurd claim that “As Operation Unified Protector comes to a close, the alliance and its partners can look back at an extraordinary job, well done. Most of all, they can see in the gratitude of the Libyan people that the use of limited force — precisely applied — can affect real, positive political change.”
Well, there’s no doubt that “limited force” — if you call 9,600 airstrikes “limited” — can produce political change, but it is difficult to see how even these two twits could think for an instant that it would be “positive.” Then Rasmussen lobbed in to Tripoli on 31 October and announced that “It’s great to be in Libya, free Libya. We acted to protect you. Together we succeeded. Libya is finally free.”
The Western mainstream media, which was so supportive of the war, has not asked the team of Rasmussen, Stavridis and Daalder how they feel about the current catastrophe in Libya that they did so much to accomplish. There are few reports in western newspapers or TV outlets about the gravity of the shambles (search, for example, the New York Times and the Washington Post), but such organizations as Human Rights Watch keep the world informed about what is going on. Its 2018 World Report records that “Political divisions and armed strife continued to plague Libya as two governments vied for legitimacy and control of the country, and United Nations’ efforts to unify the feuding parties flagged . . . Armed groups throughout the country, some of them affiliated with one or the other of the competing governments, executed persons extra-judicially, attacked civilians and civilian properties, abducted and disappeared people, and imposed sieges on civilians in the eastern cities of Derna and Benghazi.”
Thank you US-NATO, and especially thank you, President Obama and Messrs. Rasmussen, Stavridis and Daalder, and all the brave pilots who had a wonderful blitzing shindig, and all the brave button-pressers on US and UK Navy ships whose Tomahawk missiles blasted the cities. The country you wrecked will take decades to recover from your use of what you called “limited force,” and the amount of human suffering you caused is incalculable.
NATO’S Jens Stoltenberg seems to have learned the lesson, albeit belatedly, that military force does not solve what NATO regards as problems. That’s to be welcomed, and what would be even more welcome would be realization that provocation and the threat of force don’t work, either, and therefore that it would be wise to stay out of wars and to draw-down the confrontational US-NATO deployments along Russia’s borders.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Trump provided NATO’s newest member, tiny Montenegro, as an example. A nation of just 630,000 people, Trump warned “
