managing democracy is like steering a dinghy through the niagara falls......

THIS IS A complicated ARTICLE TO WRITE.

IT IS ABOUT HUMANITY ON THIS LITTLE PLANET…

IT IS ABOUT HOW HUMANITY MANAGED ITS EVOLUTION — AND WILL MANAGE IT…

IT IS ABOUT HOW some HUMANS HAVE PRICED THEIR FUTURE AT VARIOUS LEVELS OF DIVERSITY — THROUGH BELIEFS, INVENTIONS AND STYLISTIC SURVIVAL.

THESE ADVENTURES HAVE MANY LAYERS DUE TO GEOGRAPHICAL POSITIONING AND HISTORICAL MANIPULATIONS

IN RECENT TIMES, THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY HAS BEEN UNDER SOME STRONG FORCES, mainly:

THE AMERICAN POLITICAL COMPLEX

THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

THE AMERICAN MILITARY COMPLEX

THE AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX

THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC COMPLEX

THE AMERICAN “INTELLIGENCE” COMPLEX

The whole lot making THE AMERICAN COMPLEX (Empire)

Democratically, some choices are made that are not satisfactory to all and most of the present choices are hinged around values — not philosophical values — but around economic values — which include CONTROL AND CONQUESTS. The word “complex” is there to establish that there are many layers of intent, many levels of operations, of deceit and partitioned knowledge in each system of operation.

The American political complex has had one evolving goal soon after the foundation of this nation: controlling the entire world mostly through fake diplomacy (as exposed by Wikileaks and others) and bullying (using the American military complex) —…

Historically, this political complex has compressed into two major horns of the same head (Republicans and Democrats) — which for all intent and purposes is now controlled by the American military complex — headquartered in the PENTAGON.

It can be estimated that at least 25 percent of the American industrial complex is directly involved in supporting the American military complex — which is at least ten times larger than any other military set-ups of other countries. The rest of America is like an intestine and muscle power to this HEAD…

In order to achieve FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE of the world, the American system has also used the American entertainment complex that — apart from Hollywood infiltration of other cultures — includes the American (dis)information, deceitful mantras about freedom and democracy, and the Censorship Industrial Complex — to control the narrative. The American economic Complex which has financed the other systems is based on the most amount of deception designed to rob the rest of the world, while the American entertainment complex manages the information about why you are robbed and don’t notice it, because you are “debt” to the AMERICAN FINANCIAL COMPLEX — otherwise known as the American DOLLAR Empire.

The journey of this exploration ARBITRARILY followed the trail of Wilfred Burchett, Australian journalist extraordinaire, starting in 1936 — the year of the beginning of the SPANISH CIVIL WAR…

I could have started anywhere, say from the assassination Julius Caesar…

The American Complex became the ruler in a reversal of roles between the parent — the United Kingdom and its fading empire — and its progeny — the USA — rebelling against mother because of having to pax “taxes”… The American Revolution, unlike the French revolution a few years later, was not about poor people demanding fairness and bread instead of cakes, but about RICH people who did not want to pay taxes…

These days, after WW1 and WW2, mother England is like a poor woman in a rocking chair, being looked after in her dotage by the prodigal daughter, the USA, herself declining in her faculties, due to declining maturity… The American Empire has also made sure the rest of Europe is in the same retirement village…. Dinner at 5:00 PM daily…

Everywhere I looked, I found that during the Spanish Civil war, the USA maintained “neutrality”. Was this true detached altruism? A few things need to be considered:

— The American Industrial complex and the American financial complex helped Germany’s ingerwar reconstruction in discreet but “powerful” ways FOR PROFIT…

— The American complex was born from the English Enlightenment which was more about economic values that philosophical discourse.

Europe was about humanity searching for philosophical “equality” away from godly inferences, while the Enlightenment in England was about making money under good godly protestant values.

— Through Marx and Engel, the European (mostly German and French) Enlightenment led to the creation of COMMUNISM in Russia.

— The American Complex based on CAPITALISM has hated COMMUNISM ever since — and Russia in the same breath since then too.

— The relationship between England and the USA has always been intertwined — dare I say — through the simplistic philosophy contained in the language. Language contains historical meanings that do not exist in other tongues. These meanings are like bonds of belonging — including the love of money.

— In 1936, FRANCO, the Spanish dictator general, was supported by the English (thus the USA by default) and Germany (Nazi/fascists discreetly supported by the USA) against the “Republicans”, themselves supported by the Russians (COMMUNISTS).

— As well, it is reasonable to remember that Mussolini was for a while an MI6 agent, and his fascist journal was financed by the UK government IN ORDER FOR MUSSOLINI TO PROMOTE THE INEVITABILITY OF WORLD WAR TWO.

— Other side issues included the preparations for war against Germany while being on the same side in Spain (!)… and the Irish Independence which led to an annoying (to Britain) Irish “neutrality”.

— Many scholars of history, place America as the source of WW2, while WW1 was invented by an English cabal.

So, what about Wilfred Burchett views on the subject?

MORE TO COME.

Managing democracy is like steering a dinghy through the Niagara Falls......

GUS LEONISKY

CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.

By Gus Leonisky at 5 Jul 2023 - 9:20am
Gus Leonisky's blog
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nazis NED

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFTJOTmx6h0&t=565s

Scott Ritter: Russia is Ready to FINISH Ukraine as NATO Rejects Peace Negotiations

https://johnmenadue.com/bob-carr-us-must-not-got-to-war-with-china-over-taiwan/

Bob Carr: US must not go to war with China over Taiwan

https://www.rt.com/news/578955-unsc-ukraine-arms-proliferation/

Arming Ukraine is a cynical and dangerous NATO ploy, RT reporter tells UNSC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NeF1Jr6ltA

Operation Gladio: The CIA’s Secret Nazi-Collaborating Terror Armies in Europe & Beyond

https://www.amazon.com/Zionism-During-Holocaust-weaponisation-service/dp/1803693045

Zionism During the Holocaust: The weaponisation of memory in the service of state and nation

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/07/01/zelensky-will-sooner-take-back-the-moon-than-take-back-crimea-says-crimean-resident-in-a-rebuke-to-neo-conservatives/

“Zelensky Will Sooner Take Back the Moon than Take Back Crimea,” Says Crimean Resident in a Rebuke to Neo-Conservatives

https://www.rt.com/news/579061-china-criticizes-us-return-to-unesco/

US brings ‘confrontation’ to UNESCO – China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal#:

Teapot Dome scandal

AND MORE...........................

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.................

By Gus Leonisky at 5 Jul 2023 - 4:03pm
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Obama and the CIA....

A Company Family: The untold history of Obama and the CIA

By Jeremy Kuzmarov (Posted Oct 07, 2021)

Originally published: CovertAction Magazine on October 1, 2021

[This essay is another in CAM’s series on the history of the CIA. Obama has been in the news this week for overseeing groundbreaking on his presidential center. This center has sparked controversy because it will not house any actual documents and is being built on the supposedly protected Jackson Park on Chicago’s southern lakefront. Hugh Iglarsh wrote in Counterpunch that the main tower—which resembles a giant upraised cell phone—will be “a Great Tower of Nothing, a monument to hubris, chutzpah and Chicago-style clout…which rivals the Pyramid of Khufu in its brutal, enigmatic grandiosity.–Editors]

In the summer of 2012, President Barack Obama signed a secret order authorizing the CIA and other U.S. agencies to support rebels in Syria seeking to oust Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad — a nationalist who had allied with Iran and stood up to U.S. proxy Israel.1

Costing more than $1 billion, Operation Timber Sycamore evolved into the largest covert operation since the arming of mujahadin fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

U.S. Special Forces under Timber Sycamore again trained Islamic fundamentalists, this time in Jordan, who again carried out a reign of terror.2

A voracious consumer of intelligence, Obama’s trademark throughout his presidency was to move war into the shadows, a light-footprint approach designed to expand U.S. power covertly.

General Joseph Votel, head of the special operations command (SOCOM) characterized the Obama era as a “golden age for special operations.” Green Berets were deployed to 133 countries — 70 percent of the world — in 2014 alone.3

In a meeting about Afghanistan, Obama told CIA Director Leon Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted.”4

The New York Times reported that, “in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama forged with Mr. [John] Brennan,”5 an architect of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.

Obama’s worldview meshed so closely with this “unsentimental intel warrior” and “terrorist hunter” that Obama “found himself finishing Brennan’s sentences.”

An anonymous Cabinet member explained that “presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community [but] Obama was more smitten than most—this has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t seen maybe since Eisenhower.”6

The consequences could be seen in Obama’s boosting funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which promotes regime change in countries defiant of the New World Order, and his drastic expansion of the use of drones—for both surveillance and targeted killings.

The Obama administration further; a) backed coups in Ukraine and Honduras; b) pivoted the U.S. military to Asia, ramped up arms sales to Saudi Arabia and expanded military bases in Africa; c) helped suppress evidence about CIA torture, d) refused to pursue a criminal case against the CIA’s money laundering bank, HSBC, e) eavesdropped on U.S. allies and a U.S. congressman (Dennis Kucinich) who opposed his administration’s illegal invasion of Libya that devastated that country, f) stepped up surveillance and efforts to destroy Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange, and g) presided over the prosecution of a record number of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Additionally, the Obama administration a) protected longtime CIA assets from prosecution, like Rwandan mass murderer Paul Kagame; b) waged war by proxy in Yemen through the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to which it sold nearly $27 billion worth of arms; c) provided weapons to drug cartels in Mexico under the Operation Fast and the Furious while ramping up the War on Drugs through the Plan Mérida; and d) oversaw establishment of a clandestine arms pipeline from Libya to Syria by Ambassador Chris Stevens as part of Operation Timber Sycamore.7

CIA Family Connection—Ann Dunham

Obama’s record as president should not have been surprising given his family background.

His mother, Ann Dunham, worked for U.S. government agencies and allied NGOs — the Ford Foundation, Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives Inc., and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — in Indonesia in the 1960s and 1970s as well as Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Thailand.

Ann had training in the Russian language which, with everything combined, made her a “CIA recruiter’s wet dream.”8

The microfinancing projects that she worked on to help turn traditional craft industries into sustainable businesses were designed to “tether third world masses to the mentality of finance capitalism,” as Obama’s unauthorized biographer put it.

Dunham’s boss at USAID in Indonesia, Dr. Donald Gordon Jr., author of Credit for Small Farmers in Developing Countries for USAID (1976), was identified in Julius Mader’s 1968 book, Who Who’s in the CIA, as a CIA agent.9

Another boss, Peter Geithner, was future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s father.

Ann obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Hawaii, writing a thesis which argued that Indonesian villagers were dynamic and could produce greater wealth if they had access to market incentives and capital.

Ann went to Indonesia in the mid 1960s at the time that the CIA supported a military coup led by General Suharto against the left-wing regime of Sukarno.

Over two million suspected members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were rounded up and massacred in its aftermath and thousands more were imprisoned — many for decades.

Much of Ann’s anthropological and consulting field work was carried out in East and Central Java, which provided a hotbed of support for the PKI — including among members of the Javanese women’s association and labor federation.

The CIA at this time employed anthropologists and development workers as undercover agents to gather information on villagers’ political affiliations, in which Ann, according to her thesis adviser, Alice Dewey, had taken an interest.

After her arrival in Indonesia, Dunham taught English at the American Embassy in Jakarta, which also housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia and had significant satellite stations in Surabaya in eastern Java and Medan on Sumatra.

Dunham also worked for the Indonesian-American Friendship Institute in Jakarta, a suspected CIA front. One of her closest colleagues, Adi Sasono, had been the leader of the Muslim students during the overthrow of Sukarno.

While Ann’s recruitment as a CIA agent has never been openly acknowledged, she was among the few U.S. government employees with the language skills and access to fulfill this role effectively. Development projects in the region were explicitly designed to pry villagers away from the PKI orbit, and Ann’s work would have contributed to this.

In March 1965, Ann married an Indonesian Lieutenant Colonel, Lolo Soetoro, whom she met at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center, a “kinder, gentler version of the School of the Americas,” according to one writer, and “cover for a training program in which Southeast Asians were brought to Hawaii and trained to go back to create agent nets,” as U.S. Information Service (USIS) Director Frank Scotten described it.

The head of the East-West Center in 1965 was Howard P. Jones, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia from 1958 to 1965.10

Jones was present in Jakarta as Suharto and his CIA-backed military officers planned the 1965 overthrow of Sukarno, who was seen, along with the PKI as an ally of China.

Jones later defended the coup in The Washington Post, writing that Suharto was merely responding to a communist coup against Sukarno led by Colonel Untung—which was actually set up by the CIA.11

A friend of Ann’s told her biographer that the marriage to Lolo was arranged, suggesting that Ann may have acted as a female “honeypot” for the CIA whose job was to recruit assets and help them obtain U.S. citizenship.

Hailing from an aristocratic family which lost out in Sukarno’s land reform, Soetoro was recalled to active duty in July 1965 before General Suharto’s right-wing coup and worked as an army geographer in Java and Papua New Guinea, where the Indonesian army brutally suppressed popular revolts.

Soetoro went on to become an executive at Mobil Oil and its liaison to Suharto, whose economic policies Dunham praised.

CIA Family Connection—Stanley Armour Dunham

Obama’s grandfather Stanley Armour Dunham — who helped raise him — served with the 9thAir Force Division in World War II.

He was pictured in a military uniform with no insignia, which suggests an intelligence unit.

Another photo featured his daughter Ann, with the insignia of an elite school in Lebanon on her shirt in the 1950s, where Stanley may have worked with the CIA or another U.S. government agency.

In the early 1960s, Stanley Dunham was part of a group photo taken with Barack Obama, Sr., on his departure from the University of Hawaii.

Obama Sr. had been part of a State Department/CIA exchange financed in part by the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation that brought future African leaders to the U.S. who were being groomed to serve U.S. interests in the Cold War.

The photo would suggest that Dunham was one of the coordinators of the exchange, indicating work for the State Department or CIA.

According to his official biography, Dunham worked as a furniture salesman for the Standard-Grunbaum Furniture Company, which led to his frequent travel and family moves.

Independent researchers believe, however, that this job was a cover for his work as an intelligence agent, who surveilled radical groups, or military or Air Force production facilities, which is what brought him to Hawaii.

Dunham’s favorite bar in Honolulu, to which he brought young Barry, perhaps not coincidentally was owned by William J. Lederer, a known CIA agent who wrote the Cold War classic, The Ugly American.

Barack Obama, Sr.

Obama’s purported Kenyan-born father, Barack Obama, Sr., had met his mother in 1960 when he was twenty-three and she eighteen in a Russian-language class at the University of Hawaii.

The leader of the opposition Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) condemned the exchange Obama was part of for favoring certain tribes — the majority Kikuyu and minority Luo — over other tribes to support the Kenyan African National Union (KANU).

The latter’s leader, Tom Mboya, was a favorite of the CIA and opposed the Pan-Africanist currents on the continent. He was the one who selected Obama Sr. for the scholarship.

Obama Sr. returned the favor by going back to Kenya to work for the Kenyan Finance and Transport Ministries and an oil firm in Kenya before dying in a car crash in 1982. Mboya himself was assassinated in 1969.

Far-fetched as it sounds, Obama Sr. may not have been Obama’s real father.

Obama Sr. and Ann never lived together or had a real wedding, and Obama Sr. had no contact with his son, except for a short two-week visit to Hawaii when Obama was ten, which may have been for the purpose of securing Obama a spot in the coveted Punahou Prep School.12

The photo of Stanley and Obama Sr. is suspicious because what father in his right mind would be pictured smiling with the man who impregnated his teenaged daughter and then abandoned her?

There is evidence to suggest that Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, an African American journalist, sexually libertine poet, political radical and alleged target of Grandpa Dunham’s surveillance.

Obama’s friend Keith Kakugawa told an interviewer that Ann had had an affair with Davis because she was angry that the family had to move to Hawaii, away from her high-school friends who were all attending the University of Washington.

Ann became pregnant and, to hide the truth, Dunham paid Obama Sr. — whom he knew through the University of Hawaii exchange— to marry Ann, giving him the opportunity to extend his visa to attend Harvard.

Barack eventually found out the truth, writing in his first memoir, Dreams from My Father, that “the visits to Frank’s house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn’t understand.”13

Obama paid tribute to his actual father in a 1981 poem published in the Occidental College Literary Journal called “Pop,” which attributes to him features that resemble Davis, and references “Pop’s poetry, written before his mother died.”

Barack Sr. was not a poet and, although Stanley dabbled in poetry, Barry called him “gramps” and his mother committed suicide before his eighth birthday.14

Madelyn Dunham

One other connection between Obama and the U.S. national security state lies with his grandmother Madelyn — whom Obama called Toot.

Though lacking a college degree, Madelyn rose to the rank of Vice President of the Bank of Hawaii — which suggests she had high level personal connections.

In that job, Madelyn handled escrow accounts used to pay American Cold War clients in Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea and elsewhere — including through CIA proprietaries.

The Bank of Hawaii further had dealings with Nugan Hand Bank of Australia through which the CIA funded the constitutional coup d’état against Australian Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975

(SEE: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/42653).15

Covering Up the Truth

Obama and his handlers effectively covered up the truth about Obama’s family history.

They marketed Obama as a multi-racial candidate whose sensitivity to divergent cultures around the world would help restore America’s international reputation following the Bush years.

In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama presents his mother as a 1960s rebel and beatnik who partook in civil rights protests, opposed the Vietnam War, married outside her race twice, and decided to devote her career to setting up micro-lending projects for poor women in Indonesia and later Pakistan whose language and culture she absorbed.16

Obama claimed that his mother did not know about the countless atrocities that were committed by the Suharto government, which is implausible given her background and the fact that they were reported on by mainstream newspapers at the time — favorably.

Of further significance, Obama underplayed his stepfather Lolo’s army rank in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.17

Regarding his own story, Obama has promoted falsehoods at every step.

In A Promised Land, he neglects to mention that, after graduating Columbia University in 1983, he worked for about a year for Business International Corporation (BIC), a Manhattan-based consulting house to multinational corporations, where his job was to edit newsletters on business conditions in countries around the world.

Headed by a close friend of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, Jr., the former Governor of Minnesota who was involved with Humphrey in the purge of suspected communists in the Farmer-Labor Party, BIC had functioned as a CIA front.

Its sub-specialty was in recruiting left-wing organizers to use as assets, and in infiltrating foreign labor unions with the goal of promoting disruptions in targeted economies.

An activist with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) described BIC as the guys who wrote the Alliance for Progress (Marshall Plan for Latin America):

They’re the left-wing of the ruling class.18

Besides underplaying his employment with BIC, Obama in his writings omits the fact that his work as a community organizer was for the Gamaliel Foundation, a satellite of his mother’s old employer the Ford Foundation, whose underlying aim was to prevent class solidarity and the revival of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inter-racial poor people’s movement.19

Obama further leaves out that as an Illinois state senator, he partook in pay-to-play schemes granting favors to political donors like slumlord Tony Rezko who helped him purchase his Hyde Park mansion for below market value, and the CEO of a technology firm, Robert Blacwell Jr., who paid Obama $112,000 in legal fees for work that appears impossible for him to have done.

Obama’s timeline for his life story, meanwhile, is often wrong. In A Promised Land, for example, he claims to have spent three years in New York after transferring from Occidental College to Columbia after his sophomore year; however, it is believed that Obama spent the 1981-1982 school year in Pakistan and only studied at Columbia for one year.20

Obama: Defender of the U.S. Empire

Obama’s abysmal foreign policy record was telegraphed in his three major books where he promotes a defense of U.S. foreign policy while maligning and advancing stereotypes about the 1960s movements and critics of U.S. foreign policy.

In his first memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama describes 1960s Black Power icon and anti-imperialist Stokely Carmichael as a “madman” and claims to have witnessed two women selling literature outside a lecture hall where he heard Carmichael speak calling each other names like “Stalinist pig” and “reformist bitch.”

Obama editorialized that movement activists who clung to the ideals of the 1960s had become completely “removed from the struggles of those they purported to serve” or “just plain crazy.”21

In his latest memoir, A Promised Land, Obama pats himself on the back for “questioning his own assumptions,” which he writes “inoculated me against the revolutionary formulas embraced by a lot of people on the left at the dawn of the Reagan era.”22

Obama goes on to recount arguments he allegedly had with friends in college who insisted that “the American hegemon was the root of oppression worldwide.”

Obama writes that he knew better, having “lived overseas,” and would extol the “idea of America, the promise of America.”

According to Obama, the argument “would usually end with some smug bastard dropping a newspaper in front of me, its headline trumpeting the U.S. invasion of Grenada.”23

These arguments could not actually have taken place in the way Obama suggests because Obama graduated from Columbia University in May 1983, and the U.S. invaded Grenada in October 1983.

At the time of that invasion, Obama was actually working for the CIA front corporation, BIC, whose employees were unlikely to have insisted that the American hegemon was the root of worldwide oppression or to have condemned the U.S. invasion of Grenada—which had been based on false pretexts.

Obama’s Ties to the Crowns and Pritzkers

One other thing omitted by Obama is his close connection to the Crown and Pritzker families.

The Crown family — whose net worth stands at over $10 billion dollars — has long owned a significant stake in General Dynamics, manufacturer of Trident missiles, Stryker troop carriers, bunker buster bombs, LAV-25 amphibious armored vehicles, Abrams tanks, sniper rifles, and nuclear-powered submarines and naval destroyers.

During Obama’s presidency, General Dynamics bought out 11 firms specializing in satellites, geo-spatial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and amassed contracts from 16 intelligence agencies after investing $10 million in annual lobbying.

The company further embraced “every intelligence driven style of warfare,” developing small target and identification systems and equipment that could intercept insurgents’ cell phone and lab-top communications and computer software used for cyber and psychological warfare.24

The Crown family gave at least $86,636 to Obama campaigns between 1990 and 2012 and raised an additional $3,205,233 between 2007 and 2012 while paying $135,000 for Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

Susan Crown, Lester’s daughter, sat on the board of Northern Trust, which gave Obama a sweetheart loan for purchase of a $1.65 million Georgian revival mansion in Chicago’s Hyde Park complete with a thousand-bottle wine cellar.

James Crown, who was the target of a congressional and criminal probe as chairman of the J.P. Morgan Chase & Company’s risk committee, was Obama’s fundraising chair in his 2004 campaign for the Senate.25

The Crowns’ investments in Obama paid off —General Dynamics’ revenues shot up to over $30 billion in 2016, a three-fold increase from 2000. The Crowns’ net worth doubled in the Obama years, causing the family to rise in the Forbes ranking to the 27th richest family in the United States.26

Penny Pritzker of the Pritzker banking dynasty—ranked number 9 on the Forbes list with a fortune of $32.5 billion—gave $500,000 to Obama’s second inauguration—earning her appointment as Obama’s Secretary of Commerce.

Pritzker had helped finance Obama from the beginning of his political career, having allegedly met him in the early 1990s when her kids were playing on a basketball team coached by Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig Robinson.

During Obama’s 2008 White House run, Pritzker served as the national chairwoman of his campaign finance team, which shattered fundraising records, and in the 2012 reelection effort, she was a top bundler.

The Pritzker family—which made its fortune through ownership of Hyatt hotels—had long ties to the CIA. They were leading depositors in the Bahamas-based Castle Bank, a CIA outfit founded by one of the CIA’s mob liaisons, Paul Helliwell, which specialized in off-shoring money.27

The Pritzkers were also war profiteers. In 1953, family patriarchs Jay and Robert Pritzker founded the Marmon Group, an industrial holding company which includes the subsidiary Marmon Aerospace and Defense which manufactures wires and cables for aerospace, military vehicles, combat systems, radar installations and naval shipboards.

The Pritzkers—like the Crowns—thus personally profited from Obama’s mammoth military budgets, which outstripped those of President Bush by an average of $18.7 billion per year, Obama’s naval buildup in the South China Sea and his overseeing more sales of military weaponry than any other president—$60 billion more than President Bush.28

Conclusion

As the first Black president, Obama is often placed on a pedestal as a moral beacon and compared to such historic figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

These comparisons are off base, as Obama is an opportunistic and often deceitful politician who has shown a lack of moral integrity throughout his career.

Obama’s deep ties to and support of the CIA and offshoot agencies like the NED fueled great foreign policy disasters which ravaged numerous countries.

After he left the presidency, Obama worked through his consigliére John Brennan to help conjure up the “Russia Gate” scandal, which revived Cold War-era demonologies, poisoned U.S.-Russia relations and greatly increased the threat of nuclear war.

Media outlets including those on the Left continue to perpetrate many myths about Obama and to assume a defensive posture in the face of right-wing attacks.

While these attacks may be nefarious, they should not preclude sober and critical analysis about America’s forty-fourth president and the dark forces behind his rise to power and reign.

https://mronline.org/2021/10/07/a-company-family-the-untold-history-of-obama-and-the-cia/

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EU jackasses.....

Have you ever considered how primed you are to hate Russia and asked yourself why? We speak to Gilbert Doctorow who has been warning about NATO and Russophobia for years about why NATO is the line in the sand, whether or not the West will ever stop escalating with Russia and why we've been lead here by the neocons.

Why the west HATES Russia!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUVftV1Hb2I

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armed nepotism....

The defense sector hired dozens of former armed services committee and Department of Defense personnel last year, with more swinging through the so-called “revolving door” to lobby on behalf of defense sector clients for the first time in the first quarter of 2023, a new OpenSecrets analysis of federal lobbying disclosures found.

At least 672 former government officials, military officers and members of Congress worked as lobbyists, board members or executives for the top 20 defense companies in 2022, according to a new report released by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) last Wednesday. Warren’s staff utilized OpenSecrets’ revolving door database as well as corporate websites, lobbying disclosures and U.S. Senate confirmation lists to identify these individuals.

“This practice is widespread in the defense industry, giving, at minimum, the appearance of corruption and favoritism, and potentially increasing the chance that DoD spending results in ineffective weapons and programs, bad deals, and waste of taxpayer dollars,” the report says.

From 2011 through 2022, more than three-quarters of defense sectorlobbyists previously worked in the federal government. These lobbyists leveraged their relationships and expertise on a range of issues, including the annual defense spending bill, an OpenSecrets analysis of federal lobbying disclosures found.

President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget proposal requested a record $886 billion for defense spending. Over one-third of the defense budget went to the top 100 Department of Defense contractors in 2021, the most recent year for which the U.S. government has published contracting data.

The defense sector plus Boeing spent more than $38.6 million on federal lobbying during the first quarter of 2023. OpenSecrets codes Boeing as part of the transportation sector since the company gets most of its money from commercial airplane sales, but it also designs and manufactures fighter jets, helicopters, missile systems and drones, among other military-grade aerospace systems.

Of the 708 lobbyists working on behalf of defense companies so far in 2023, at least 517 swung through the revolving door. OpenSecrets estimates the defense sector has hired more than 2,700 revolving door lobbyists since 2001.

“To keep the money flowing, defense contractors frequently hire former Pentagon and other government officials to help them win defense contracts from their former colleagues,” Warren’s report found.

One of the revolving door lobbyists who registered to lobby on behalf of new defense clients in the first quarter of 2023 is Michelle Jelnicky, who left her job as legislative director to Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mississippi) in January to work as the associate director of global government relations at weapons manufacturer Raytheon.

Jelnicky worked on armed services and international relations policy while on Capitol Hill, according to her LinkedIn. She immediately began lobbying Congress and the Department of Defense on the National Defense Authorization Act for 2024, among other provisions, according to Raytheon’s first quarter federal lobbying disclosure.

Another recent revolving door lobbyist is Paul Arcangeli, who was the Democratic House Armed Services Committee staff director for 12 years before he left in June 2022 to become a principal at Invariant, a government relations firm. Arcangeli started lobbying during the third quarter of 2022 and works for several defense clients including Raytheon, leveraging his expertise and relationships for his clients.

House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith(D-Washington) recognized Arcangeli for his “indispensable role in supporting the passage of nearly one-third of every NDAA the House has ever considered,” according to Arcangeli’s Invariant bio. Arcangeli “educate[d] members on commercial items in FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act” on behalf of Raytheon during the first quarter of 2022, according to Invariant’s federal lobbying disclosure.

Neither Jelnicky nor Arcangeli responded to OpenSecrets’ request for comment.

A Strong First Quarter for Top Defense Contractors

The Department of Defense’s five biggest contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman — all reported “strong” first quarters, even as all but Boeing spent less on federal lobbying in the first quarter of 2023 than in recent years.

The largest federal defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, spent $3.3 million on federal lobbying during the first quarter of 2023. That’s slightly down from 2022 and the lowest amount the company has spent on federal lobbying in a single quarter since 2011. The forthcoming annual defense spending bill was a top priority for Lockheed Martin lobbyists, mentioned repeatedly in the company’s first quarter lobbying disclosure.

Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet told investors during the first quarter earnings call they should “anticipate heightened emphasis on national security prioritization from Congress, supplemental spending requests including Ukraine and elevated demand from allies and partners.”

“The near peer threats posed by China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is driving the national defense strategy and has created added demand for Lockheed Martin’s advanced effective solutions,” Taiclet said.

Raytheon, which spent $3.1 million on federal lobbying during the first quarter of 2023, also reported a strong start to the year, with sales up 10% according to a presentation for the first quarter earnings call with investors. Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes told investors he was “very encouraged” by Biden’s 2024 budget request of $886 billion for the Pentagon. Hayes said the biggest challenge for sales is “getting it out the door at this point,” with the company reporting a record $180 billion in backlog.

“We still are constrained from a supply chain standpoint, although it’s getting a hell of a lot better,” Hayes said.

Boeing also saw revenues from its defense, space and security programs jump from $5.5 billion during the first quarter of 2022 to $6.5 billion during the first quarter of 2023. The aerospace company spent $3.8 million on federal lobbying during the first quarter, more than it’s spent during the same period since 2017.

In addition to the annual defense spending bill, Boeing lobbyists reported lobbying on a range of issues including commercial aviation policy, supply chain, Russian sanctions, relations with China and international sales. Boeing hired more revolving door lobbyists than the other top 20 defense companies, Warren’s analysis found.

Northrop Grumman told investors the company saw “strong” first quarter sales and noted the “President’s budget request demonstrates strong support for [Northrop Grumman] programs” in its first quarter earnings presentation.

The aerospace and defense company spent $4.4 million on federal lobbying during the first three months of 2023, its lowest level of first quarter lobbying spending since 2015. In addition to lobbying on the annual defense spending bill, “Export Control Reform, Foreign Military Sales, Defense Trade, International Sales” were part of Northrop Grumman’s lobbying portfolio, according to first quarter lobbying disclosure.

“Global defense budgets are increasing as many U.S. allies modernize and expand their defense capabilities. An important part of our long-term growth strategy is focused on leveraging our portfolio to meet these growing global needs, and we continue to make progress in this area,” Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden told investors.

General Dynamics’ lobbyists disclosed lobbying Congress and the State Department on “foreign military sales & direct commercial sales to include those by non-United States based subsidiaries.” The company spent more than $3 million on federal lobbying during the first three months of 2023 on issues including federal budgeting, homeland security, trade, aerospace and defense.

General Dynamics brought in nearly $9.9 billion during the first quarter of 2023, “$400 million more in revenue than anticipated,” CEO Phebe Novakovic told investors.

“Obviously, we are off to a good start here,” Novakovic said.

Senior Researcher Dan Auble and Research Intern Rachel Timmons contributed to this report.

https://truthout.org/articles/over-500-former-government-officials-are-now-lobbying-for-defense-contractors/

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By Gus Leonisky at 8 Jul 2023 - 8:43am
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sacrificing others....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WhlGxXa9bQ

Ukraine gaining ground? Prigozhin & Wagner rebellion - the US Presidential race | Scott Ritter

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By Gus Leonisky at 9 Jul 2023 - 6:59pm
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What happens when reality hits delusion? U.S. mythology and fantasy will remain resilient. Denial, doubling-down, scapegoating, recrimination and more audacious adventures are the instinctive responses, writes Michael Brenner.

Americans discount the past. They live in the present and imagine the future. Events are assimilated into a mythologized pageant of progress that leads to an ever fuller realization of a more perfect union — liberty and justice at home, goodwill and good works abroad.

Happenings of an unseemly nature are sanitized so as to conform to the self-image of destiny’s child born in a state of original virtue; or they are encapsulated and repressed.

Deep within us, though, they survive in a state of indeterminant hibernation — along with the passions, impulses and ambitions that generated those misdeeds. They become spores, dormant until a favorable environment appears for their reactivation.

What we are witnessing in the United States today is a recrudescence of baneful elements from earlier times: the rapacious society that ruthlessly decimated the indigenous peoples from sea to shining sea; that warred against Mexico to steal half of its lands; that attacked Spain’s overseas possessions to build the early foundation of empire; that policed the Caribbean basin to its commercial advantage; that jailed those who voiced disagreement with the U.S.’ entry into World War I; that has glorified the frontier’s violence, sharp-dealing and wanton destruction of nature denied its status as an heirloom.

Certainly, those unbecoming episodes from the past resonate with what we observe today: in the United States’ rampage through the Middle East, its resort to systemic torture, its belligerence and bullying, its repressive treatment of critics at home, its crude and corrupt electoral politics.

These deeds are at variance with the country’s principles, its self-image, its external image and, too, a 20th century record that included policies and attitudes that aimed at generating public goods and attentive to the general welfare.

Moreover, our largely capable leaders who possessed an ingrained sense of responsibility for the good of the commonweal contrast sharply with our present crop of inept and feckless leaders with whom the nation is saddled.

We now are experiencing a clash between those latter virtues and the revival of those malign, demonic elements wresting free of their sublimation.

Four Evils

A diagrammatic depiction of the United States today must give central place to four interwoven facets of contemporary American society.

They are: plutocracy; the growing neo-Fascist movement; the erosion of fidelity to core Constitutional values, accompanied by a timidity in taking action to defend them.

This is evident in each of three branches of government, at state and local levels, and even among the galaxy of our famed civic institutions that populate the social landscape; and a pervasive self-centeredness that is at once an effective and reinforced cause of the nihilism that is a hallmark of our times — sapping the lifeblood out of the body politic while encouraging all manner of erratic behavior.

The complexity of the composition thus created is impossible to explicate within reasonable limits of time and space. So, let’s simply illustrate how each in its own right is manifest in the country’s external dealings.

The Financial Sector

One: Washington is unable, and disinclined, to pursue any policy that contravenes the narrow, self-defined interests of the financial and commercial powerhouses who control the political parties through electoral campaign donations and bribes, won a de facto tax holiday, monopolize the major media, underwrite foundations and think tanks so as to shape their product, and hatch schemes to infiltrate and reprogram educational institutions at every level as an invasive species denatures the eco-system.

The financial sector is the most prominent, active and influential of these private economic entities. Since they are institutionalized globally, the entire American outlook on multilateral organizations (the IMF, the World Bank, GATT, SWIFT) and their programs is dictated by the benefits that flow from them: earnings for private interests, clout for the government to cajole, coerce or dictate to other countries The abusive use made of SWIFT and the IMF in the confrontation with Russia is case in point.

When we imagine trade negotiations and accords, we visualize mainly the exchange of manufactured goods and natural resources. That is no longer the case. What counts, above all, are financial arrangements. Intellectual property comes second. Energy and agriculture next. Manufactures are an also-ran.

At present, it is China that dominates that sector of international commerce. Its overall manufacturing capacity is greater than that of the U.S., the EU and Japan combined. Add Russia’s capacity (and raw materials) to that number and you understand both Washington’s dedication to leveraging those economic assets that it retains (backed by military assets) and its mounting sense of vulnerability.

A Rising Tide

Two: The rise of a potent, expanding movement that should be properly labelled “Fascism with American characteristics” to date has had only a relatively slight bearing on the country’s foreign policy. The monsters its militants seek to slay, the enemies they see as poisoning the well of Americanism, are domestic.

The Russia threat, the China threat, the fading Islamo-fascist threat are not what drives its adherents — although they share the unanimous conviction that all of the above are evil-doers hostile to the United States. Still, it is the turmoil at the Mexican border that really gets their blood boiling — the only “foreign” issue that is as emotional, as bile-producing, as liberal elites, atheists and baby-killers.

What the future will bring in the way of adding an international dimension to this stew is unpredictable. As of now, Republicans are mainly focused on denouncing whatever President Joe Biden does rather than promoting any foreign policy agenda of their own.

Degrading Democracy

Three: The degradation of American democracy is perhaps the most profound development in the troubled state of contemporary America. Its deleterious effects are multiple — and likely enduring if not absolutely irreversible.

Most obviously, an American Republic in which “government of the people, for the people, by the people” is a motto that strikes only a faint, nostalgic note is not the country on which a mighty nation was built and which has been the grounding for the individual as well as collective self-esteem that always has distinguished the United States.

What it does do is to sow doubt as to the superiority of the American enterprise, to weaken self-confidence, to undercut American credibility among other peoples and other governments, and to dissolve that veneer of goodwill — a compound of truth and fable — that so effectively has smoothed the path to global dominance.

Moreover, it breeds a cynicism that spills over from the domestic scene to dealings abroad. Autocratic methods, arrogance, the loss of any capacity for empathy, the zero-sum conception of all relationships are liabilities — ones that are unsuited for an America of diminishing prowess and relative strength in a world moving rapidly in the direction of multipolarity and multilateralism.

Finally, it tends to bring to power in Washington persons whose skills have been honed for the rough-and-tumble of domestic wars rather than for statesmanlike vision and diplomacy.

Disengagement From Reality

Four: Nihilism and narcissism are a matching pair. They go together. A fluid socio-cultural environment encourages individuals to “do their own thing” without fear of opprobrium or penalty. Limits are vague, restraints weak, models that convey the unspoken message are plentiful.

The aggregation of persons so uninhibited accentuates the nihilism of society. A disengagement from reality is the outcome. In the first instance, it is a disengagement from norms and conventions. That leads to a disengagement from the objective features of the environment in which you live and act.

Disregard for the concerns of others (ignoring them or, in more extreme cases, not even recognizing that they exist); disregard for history, background, context; disengagement from tangible reality itself — ultimately disengagement from their former selves.

We are close to a condition that approximates what the psychologists call “dissociation.” It is marked by an inability to see and to accept actualities as they are for deep seated emotional reasons.

Thus, Janet Yellen is dispatched to Beijing in a futile attempt to persuade the Chinese leadership to moderate their strategy of de-dollarization, and to free American business from the Beijing government’s oversight, on the same day that the State Department warns American citizens of the risks they run by visiting China.

This in the context of an overt public campaign to undermine the Chinese economy via a campaign of boycott and embargo — e.g. denying Chinese companies the right to invest in high-tech sectors or to collaborate with American firms and arresting the CFO of Huawei.

Thus, Biden calls Chinese President Xi Jinping a “dictator” in a free associative string of insults two days after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken returns from his own trek to Beijing in a supposed effort to relax tense relations between the two rivals (in fact, of course, a short-term lowering of the temperature so as to give Washington more time to prepare its anti-China project).

Thus, Biden can declare Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Salman a “pariah” to be shunned and then goes hat-in-hand to Riyadh pleading for his cooperation in lowering spiking oil prices by increasing Saudi production.

Thus, as part of the same desperate effort he dispatches an envoy to Caracas to cajole Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to do the same — the very man the U.S. vilifies and has sought to overthrow by means unfair and foul.

Thus, the entire national security team embarks on a confrontation with Russia on Ukraine in the utterly fanciful belief that its economy will collapse like a house of cards (a gas station with nuclear weapons masquerading as a great power), and Russian President Vladimir Putin (that KGB thug) toppled, once sanctions are imposed.

Thus, the near universal conviction in Washington’s corridors of power that a better trained, equipped, and motivated Ukraine actually could win a war against Russia.

Thus, the facile assumption that you can steal hundreds of billions of Russian assets in the custody of Western financial institutions while paying scant attention to the incentive that gives other large depositors to move their liquid holdings elsewhere and to abandon the dollar.

Thus, you cavalierly blow up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline oblivious to how that act is in stark opposition to your “rules-based order” slogan.

Thus, the Biden White House bubbles with optimism as the foredoomed Prigozhin putsch in confidence that it will be a replay of Napoleon’s escape from Elba and march on Paris. In this latter cluster of cases, we see a display of willful ignorance whereby one’s wishes and desires fashion a virtual reality – a fable – that bears no relation to actual facts but is comforting and convenient.

[Related: Prigozhin’s War]

Furthermore, the vise-like grip this attitude has on thought and policy barely loosens even as the Russian economy proves robust, when Putin is more popular and secure than ever, when Ukraine’s military is being methodically dismantled despite the West’s supplying it with vast quantities of weapons (exposed as inferior to Russia’s) and money.

This conforms exactly to the pattern of behavior that narcissistic individual evinces in their mundane individual lives.

Thus, finally, Ukraine is anointed as a flourishing democracy deserving to enter the exclusive “garden” inhabited by the virtuous – NATO & European Union. This effusion of respect for a country that is a sump of corruption, where all political parties except those of the rulers are banned, where draconian censorship has liquidated any semblance of media independence (far more repressive than in Putin’s Russia), where the mildest of dissenters are exiled or jailed, where statues are being erected to honor Stepan Bandera, the homicidal chief of the Ukrainian SS that were the Nazis’ partners in World War II.

A few, the Victoria Nulands, may know the score but cynically ignore these awkward truths as they relentlessly drive their own agenda for hegemonic control. However, most of the country’s political class who cultivate this deceit suffer from the collective fantasy that America’s nihilism fosters.

Thus, finally, there is Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky who is embraced with the starry-eyed acclaim reserved for the most fulgurant celebrities. The comedian from the Balkan Borscht Belt whose greatest prior achievement was to star in a Ukrainian soap opera where he played a befuddled Ukrainian president.

Promoted by a sleazy billionaire at a time when Petro Poroshenko was polling in the single digits, he ran as the peace candidate who promised to reconcile with Putin. Immediately upon taking office, he was strong-armed by the hard men who provide the steel and uber-nationalist dogma that sustains the post-coup regime.

He has been a remarkably successful front man. His performance is the ultimate tribute to Stanislavski method acting. Put differently, Zelensky is the consummate conman whose unabashed non-stop lying is integral to the part. Deceit becomes a way of life. Truth and falsity are indistinguishable for somebody who rejects the notion that the former has a claim to primacy — it is strictly a matter of personal preference.

This undeniable theatrical talent may qualify him for an Oscar — but his reverential embrace by the West as a hybrid Nelson Mandela/Vaclav Havel — with a dash of Churchill — provides the most compelling evidence of how total the disengagement from reality has become. Zelensky’s wholly fictitious recounting of events — or non-events — then are broadcast as Gospel Truth by complicit, believing media from New York to Melbourne; a perverse variation on the children’s game “Simon Says.”

The oddity in this woeful performance lies not in the serial misjudgments per se. It is that most are not the outcome of a deliberate policy process. Rather, they appear as rash, compulsive and disconnected effusions.

These decisions and actions express an irrepressible urge to fill a want, a desire, a selfish need. They are expected to achieve their aim because that is the natural outcome due the privileged self. This behavioral pattern is pure narcissism — writ large for the collective elite persona.

When Reality Confronts Narcissism

It would be erroneous to call this behavior gambling. Gamblers know the odds, they calibrate risk in full knowledge of what the chances of success are balanced against a clear prospective gain. That kind of conscious rationality is absent from the examples noted above.

For a gambler, awareness of realities is crucial; for a narcissistic policy-maker, inhabiting a fantasy world, what they see of reality and how they see it is dictated by subjective want and desire.

What happens when reality punches the narcissist(s) in the face? When the Russian army is on the Dnieper? When deindustrialization joins with inflation to drag the EU into depression? When the Sino-Russian bloc of BRICS breaks the American controlled phalanx of financial overlords? When Saudi Arabia waves good-bye?

When prized organizations of the collective West start to take on the appearance of Wall Street gentlemen’s clubs in 1935 whose complacent and self-satisfied members gazed out the mullioned windows at the growing crowd of militant protestors?

Mythology and fantasy can be expected to remain resilient. Denial, doubling-down, scapegoating, recrimination, more and more audacious adventures are the instinctive responses.

For to come to terms with reality carries two intolerable threats to the narcissistic self:

1) exposing as mere conceit the core, unconscious premise that the world ultimately will always accommodate itself to your wants and needs; and

2) admission of wrong — conceptual, behavioral, interpretative — is fatally incompatible with the exalted sense of self. Vietnam is the outstanding example — demonstrating how powerful, and effective, is the impulse to forget whatever disconcerts the core of one’s being.

The most obvious and important implication is that Americans will be ever more dependent on maintaining that sense of exceptionalism and superiority that is the foundation of their national personality.

A fragile psyche, weak in self-esteem and prowess, is sensitive to signs of its decline or ordinariness. It follows that every conflictual encounter is magnified, loaded with the full weight of the compulsive campaign to confirm a now jeopardized sense of national greatness.

Hence, the obsession with curbing China. Hence, the United States will continue to exert itself energetically on the global stage rather than become progressively more selective in its engagements and choice of methods for fulfilling them.

Continuity is a lot easier than reorientation. It doesn’t demand fresh thinking and different skills. Quite frankly, today, the caliber of high- and mid-level personnel would have to be upgraded. Less amateurism and careerism, more experience and sophisticated knowledge.

It follows that the United States will not negotiate any Ukrainian peace deal that satisfies Moscow’s primary conditions.

It follows that its mano y mano contest with China will escalate as Washington resorts to increasingly drastic measures — more so since early indicators of success are disconcertingly rare.

It follows that Washington will pull out all stops to coerce smaller, vulnerable BRICS states back into the fold.

It follows that schemes will be devised to stymie the ramifications of the Saudi-Iranian détente — all in cahoots with Israel.

It will accelerate and expand its new-found statist industrial policy whereby a trillion or is funneled to the big players in high tech, IT and energy while erecting barriers to foreign involvement in the American economy.

It will do so even as it continues to demand that the rest of the world abide by neoliberal strictures that open the way for American financial and corporate profit seekers.

The Tender American Ego

As I have written in an earlier commentary:

Americans are struggling to draw into focus their exalted image of themselves and reality. They are not doing a very good job of it. The gap is wide and growing.

Fading prowess is one of the most difficult things for humans to cope with — whether it be an individual or a nation. By nature, we prize our strength and competence; we dread decline and its intimations of extinction. This is especially so in the United States where for many the individual and the collective persona are inseparable.

No other country tries so relentlessly to live its legend as does the U.S. Today, events are occurring that contradict the American narrative of a nation with a unique destiny. That creates cognitive dissonance.

Americanism acts as a Unified Field Theory of self-identity, collective enterprise, and the Republic’s enduring meaning. When one element is felt to be jeopardy, the integrity of the whole edifice becomes vulnerable. In the past, American mythology energized the country in ways that helped it to thrive. Today, it is a dangerous hallucinogen that traps Americans in a time warp more and more distant from reality.

A drive to revalidate on presumed virtue and singularly now impels what America does in the world. Hence, the calculated stress placed on slogans like “democracy vs autocracy.” That is a neat metaphor for the uneasy position in which Uncle Sam finds himself these days.

The U.S. proudly pronounces its enduring greatness from every lectern and altar in the land, pledges to hold its standing as global No. 1 forever and ever; yet, it constantly bumps its head against an unaccommodating reality.

Instead of downsizing the monumental juggernaut or applying itself to a delicate raising of the arch, the U.S. makes repeated attempts to fit through in a vain effort to bend the world to fit its mythology. Evocation of the Concussion Protocol is in order — but nobody wants to admit that sobering truth.

The Russia Animus

Among the many oddities of the Ukraine affair, the most astonishing is the frenzy of hostile passion directed at Putin, Russia and everything Russian. Nothing close to this has been seen since World War II when Hitler and the Nazis were Satan incarnate. Even then, it was not everything German that was cast as evil. That total condemnation was reserved for the Japanese.

During the depths of the Cold War, it was Communism and the Soviet Union that were the object of fear and antipathy – not quite completely synonymous with Russia.

This puzzling phenomenon cries out for explanation. The first thing to be said on this score, is that the passion and drive have come from American elites. There has been no great wave of popular outrage, no mass demonstrations, no blood-curdling calls for revenge and punishment. No post-9/11 national trauma.

Instead, the fury is generated by our government leaders (Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland, Harris, Pelosi, Cruz); from the media world’s clueless news presenters-cum-propogandists, from the seemingly demonically possessed editors of The New York Times who have discovered the thrills of ‘yellow journalism,’ from the likes of Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, from the scores of Nobel Prize winners who in concert have lent their weight to the crusade; from the university presidents presiding over pious vigils who are thankful that the spotlight is shifting away from the innumerable scandals they are paid hefty sums to whitewash; and the Gold Medal to the International Olympic Committee who bans crippled athletes from competing in the Winter Paralympics because their passport says ‘Russia’.

All are hugely self-satisfied. None of them ever blinked an eye as the United States for 20 years has killed, maimed, starved and tortured hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria et. al. in exercises of brutality that have left the country’s security in a more precarious state than when the onslaught began.

Why the Historical Hostility?

The United States and Russia have never fought a war. No bad blood is between them. The one, minor incidence involved the American expeditionary force deployed near Archangel and at Vladivostok during the Russian civil war in 1918-1919.

This symbolic gesture led to just a handful of casualties. There also were a few dogfights over the Yalu River in Korea where some MIG pilots reportedly were Russian. That’s it. It is doubtful that more than one American in a thousand ever heard of those incidents.

The Cold War, admittedly, was a multi-layered hostile confrontation that lasted for 40 years. But military combat was limited to proxies. Then, too, the two countries were allies in the great test of World War II. Without Soviet/Russian fortitude and sacrifice, Germany may not have been defeated.

In other words, one sees no basis for the visceral antagonism toward Russia and Russians now on display. Among many, even at the highest levels, emotions shade into outright hatred.

It is hard to find equivalents; that is to say, analogous passions certainly are to be found in the annals of history, but never against an essentially benign background. Hormone rushes and sound policy are not compatible.

Ascriptive Division

Societies all have affinities and aversions with others based on race, ethnicity, language, ideology or religion. They can lead to empathy and bonding or a sense of separation and distaste. Often, the latter sentiments have fueled or aggravated competition and conflict. The examples are too numerous and obvious to denote.

When we turn our attention to Russo-American mutual perceptions, we observe little in the way of rooted ascriptive divisions. Both are overwhelmingly Caucasian and Christian in heritage. Catholic vs Orthodox rivalries are distant in time and place. Ethnically, Slavic Russia does not stand in stark contrast to the multitudinous American mix.

The contrasts and divergences derive from the all-out ideological war between the Soviet Union’s aggressive secularism accompanying Communism’s threat to Western politico-economic foundations.

A Nation of Shared Delusions

Americans are good at forgetting. They also are good at relying on national myths to keep their lives buoyant. The two go together. To make sense of this we should recognize that the essence of the American experience is the common belief that the country was born as Destiny’s child – hence, American history is viewed as a pageant of progress, of achievement, of success, of fulfillment.

Any deviation from that exalted norm has to be neutralized. That is done by one of a number of ways: by recasting the occurrence as something other than what it in fact was (Korea; in a minor key Venezuela); shift time perspectives to highlight less negative images (Pearl Harbor and World War II); foster a deceptive narrative from the start (Syria, Ukraine); sublimate.

A country that was “born against history” had no past to define and shape the present. A country that was born against tradition had no rooted and common sense of meaning and value that cut deeply into the national psyche. A country that was born against inherited place and position left each individual at once free to acquire status and obliged to do so for insignia of rank were few.

Strenuous displays of patriotism have a contrived cast to them. They suggest strained efforts to overcome doubt more than they do genuine pride and conviction. National self-confidence is not demonstrated by gigantic flags seen everywhere from used car lots to hot sheet motels, the ubiquitous lapel pin, the loud and gaudy demonstrations of chauvinism at sporting matches, the bombast of shock jockeys, or the belittling and condescending treatment of other peoples. Rather, those are sure signs of weakness, doubt and insecurity.

Here, again, we have a discrepancy between public attitudes in general and political elites – especially the foreign affairs community. Its pivot is less intellectual than it is one of feelings: pride, self-esteem and national esteem. It is among the latter that we find an acute concern about America’s standing as Number 1 in the world: supreme, dominant, and hegemonic. A gnawing sense that the U.S. is losing that status, that it is becoming an ’ordinary’ power is unsettling.

Fading prowess is one of the most difficult things for humans to cope with – whether it be an individual or a nation. By nature, we prize our strength and competence; we dread decline and its intimations of extinction. This is especially so in the United States where for many the individual and the collective persona are inseparable.

America’s exalted sense of self is rooted in the belief that Americans are pace-setters and world beaters in every domain. The state of affairs sketched above – marked by impulsive enterprises that underline a foredoomed, audacious ambition to gain global dominance – does not represent cool strategic judgment.

It is the national equivalent of ostentatious iron-pumping by bodybuilders worried about losing muscle tone. Those worries never disappear, though, even as one becomes muscle-bound striving ever more energetically to reassure oneself that nothing is creeping up behind you. The mirror is much preferred to the backward glance. More important, they fool themselves into the false belief that other, more relevant adjustments to reality are either unnecessary or intolerable.

The tension associated with a nation so constituted encountering objective reality does not force heightened self-awareness or a change in behavior if the dominant feature of that reality is the attitudes and expressed opinions of others who share the underlying delusions.

Michael Brenner is a professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. mbren@pitt.edu

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/07/10/the-new-new-world/

READ FROM TOP.

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

AT THE CORE OF THE AMERICAN BEHAVIOUR IS THE DESIRE TO DESTROY RUSSIA — SINCE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1917....

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