The United States of Atrocity part 2

How To Fight the Establishment Propaganda Machine and Win

https://t.co/8sy9D8dLJX

"The simple best way to take down the oligarchy is by aggressively and relentlessly attacking its propaganda engine. The elite who manipulate your government are more vulnerable now than ever before and they know it...."

Why We're Underestimating American Collapse

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48807.htm

"America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days...The strange new pathologies of the world's first rich failed state."

Florida Gov Rick Scott: 'The FBI Director Needs To Resign' After Botched Florida Shooter Investigation

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/florida-gov-rick-scott-the-fbi-directo...

Too busy chasing Russian phantoms...

NDPP wrote:

Florida Gov Rick Scott: 'The FBI Director Needs To Resign' After Botched Florida Shooter Investigation

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/florida-gov-rick-scott-the-fbi-directo...

Too busy chasing Russian phantoms...

Given what I am sure is Governor Scott's long-standing commitment to enhanced gun-control, I can imagine he was upset at not getting more support from the FBI to stop school shootings.

Yep.

American Monsters Family Portrait

http://twitter.com/timand2037/status/1037262354600407040

"Did you really think they were any different?"

Who Will Save Us From America?    -    by John Wight

https://t.co/t2Bje3hfKy?amp=1

"A short discourse on the American nightmare..."

..from democracy now headlines

Senate Passes $674 Billion Military Spending Bill

In news from Capitol Hill, the Senate has voted 93 to 7 to approve a $674 billion military spending bill. Every Democratic senator supported the bill. Six Republicans and independent Senator Bernie Sanders opposed it.

Macleans interviews Chris Hedges:

Why the American Empire Has Lost Control  And Its Failure is Imminent

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/why-the-american-empire-h...

"Hedges talks to the most oppressed and dispossessed citizens of an empire he thinks has not much more than a decade of life left..

'Put it this way: nations have lost control of their own economies, in essence. So it doesn't  matter what people want. There is no way to vote against the global interests of Goldman Sachs or Exxon Mobil. You can't do it..."

Scientists Raise Alarm Over US Bio-Weapons Programs

https://t.co/uPbV45PYAs

"Recent evidence about deadly tests and biological substances in Tbilisi, Georgia raised alarms about US biological weapons research in foreign countries. The US is running biological weapons research accross the globe..."

^ I'd like to read more of the report itself. The WSWS article mixes a few quotes with its own paraphrasing, possibly to give a more sensationalist account.

The findings of the panel, published as a report titled “Providing for the Common Defense,” can be summarized as follows: The US military is entirely correct to prepare for war with Russia and China. But the Pentagon, which spends more each year than the next eight largest national military forces combined, requires a massive expansion in military spending, to be paid for with cuts to bedrock social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Does the "as follows" include everything that comes after it in the paragraph? IOW, did the report actually demand cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and social security? And if we are to assume it did, are we also to assume that the report made the observation that  the US spends more on its military than the next eight largest powers combined? In my experience, that last point is usually made by people who want a DECREASE in military spending, not an increase.

Christopher Hedges: Farewell America (and audio)

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/christopher-hedges-farewell-america-1.491...

"Christopher Hedges believes that the American empire is ending. As a foreign correspondent who witnessed the depravities of war, Hedges is seeing the unraveling of the American state much as he has seen other states unravel. For him, resistance is the only moral act remaining..."

Costs of War: 17 Years After 9/11, Nearly Half a Million People Have Died in Global “War on Terror”

quote:

NETA CRAWFORD: Well, we found that after 17 years, these wars are at stalemate, and we have plans to keep going. We’re going to spend probably another $100 billion over the next five years. That is in addition to the nearly $6 trillion that we’ve already spent and obligated.

quote:

NETA CRAWFORD: Well, we wanted to highlight both the cost to Americans in terms of U.S. soldiers and sailors who have lost their lives—about 7,000 people—but, in addition, remind us all that contractors—more contractors, in fact, have died because of their involvement in these wars than soldiers and sailors—and that, of course, many thousands of civilians have been killed, wounded and displaced. Many millions have been killed, wounded and displaced.

quote:

NETA CRAWFORD: Right. A lot of these wars is now sort of externalized or displaced. So, think about the contractors. As you’ve said, they’re from other places, but they work for and are paid for by U.S. corporations. But other things are externalized. So, for instance, the healthcare costs of the veterans. Yes, billions are paid for the veterans in a hundred—I’m sorry, the 3 million U.S. veterans that are home now, some of them are on disability. That’s being paid for by the U.S. government, but some of those costs are actually borne by the families of veterans. So, much of what is spent, we actually can’t account for, because it’s—these costs are borne by other people. So, when people are injured or killed in war zones, yes, we hear about it, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, I think, in terms of direct and indirect death.

quote:

NETA CRAWFORD: Yeah, these wars are actually leaving the war zones in rubble. And you haven’t mentioned Pakistan yet, but the United States has also been, through drone strikes and other action, fighting in Pakistan since 2002 in order to chase and defeat Taliban, al-Qaeda and now ISIS. So, the war zones are actually expanded from what we thought they would be in 2001, 2002, 2003. Now the U.S. forces are operating between 80 to 90 countries all over the world.

quote:

AMY GOODMAN: And the relation between war and climate change? You say the Pentagon is the single largest user of petroleum?

NETA CRAWFORD: That’s right. Between 2010 and 2015, the Pentagon used about 105 billion barrels of oil, on average, each year. They’ve tried to economize, because, obviously, that’s expensive, but it is the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the United States and abroad.

..1/2 million was the headline but in the 2nd quote crawford is saying many millions.

..the displacement numbers from the report are 21 million. they are probably higher.

quote:

NETA CRAWFORD: Right. Well, things have gotten harder. For example, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, who investigates U.S. operations, looking for waste, fraud and abuse, has not been able to release to the American public figures that were previously known about the number of Afghan soldiers and police killed in these wars. So the Afghan people know that their soldiers are paying a high price in death and injury, but the American people don’t know that. And we don’t know how large even the Afghan military is. There are other pieces of information that were previously available which have essentially disappeared down a memory hole or been sort of given to us in a barrage of information, sort of a firehose of information, so we can’t pick out the relevant details. So, in a sense, it has become harder to do these reports because there’s more information withheld.

..yes. exactly.

America's Post-9/11 Wars Have Cost $5.9 Trillion

https://www.thenation.com/article/pentagon-military-madness/

"...In its solution, the commission calls for an increase in Pentagon spending of 3 to 5 percent above inflation for at least the next five years...The high end of this range would mean an annual Pentagon budget of an astonishing $972 billion by 2024 - a potential boon for Lockheed Martin and its fellow weapons-makers, but a disaster for US taxpayers. 

The US spends more on its military than the next seven countries in the world combined (five of which are US allies). The increase in Pentagon spending in the past two years alone is greater than the entire military budget of Russia.  And that's before the massive increases proposed by the strategy commission..."

The Terrible Origins of July 4th

https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-terrible-origins-july-4th

"The present day traditions of enjoying cookouts, vacations and fireworks should not obscure the true meaning of this date..."

An Anti-Imperialist Ponders the 4th of July and its Meaning for his Newborn Child

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/07/04/

"Questions that usually go answered on this day include: Why are we celebrating this nation? What, if any, benefits have been brought to the world by the existence of the United States?

Gabriela, your incidental birth within the United States means you are a part of a citizenry that has a collective proverbial gun pointed at the people of the rest of the world..."

Keiser Report: Return of the Robber Barons

https://youtu.be/ry_Ey7EItCI

 In this episode of Keiser Report, Max & Stacy look back to the most notorious robber-baron for the Guilded Age, Jay Gould, and see what insight he could offer to the internecine conflict during this age of Robber Barons 2.0.

'Gould gives us a good quote to help us understand the current hyper-partisanship that we see: 'I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.'

"They'll jail you for stealing from your employer but not from stealing from your employees. They'll jail you for whistleblowing on civilian-killing drone strikes but not for killing civilians with drones. They'll jail you for insider-trading unless you're doing it openly in the US Congress."

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1471613078806482945

UN Human Rights Council Condemns Continued Operation of Guantanamo Bay

https://twitter.com/NilsMelzer/status/1480689244003840001

"Today, we - a group of independent human rights experts appointed by the Human Rights Council - have condemned the continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as a site of 'unparalleled notoriety.' 20 yrs of torture, arbitrariness and abuse must end now!"

https://youtu.be/yNCyrFV2G_0

Pentagon Building New Secret Courtroom at Gitmo

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/29/us/politics/pentagon-guantanamo-secre...

Say it ain't so, Joe!

Democrats show their shared blood-soaked colours. Squabbling between the two homocidal US party factions vanishes as they literally line up to vereate the worst of the worst as their champion:

"Dick Cheney Should Be in Jail, Not Praised as a Hero by Democrats
by Chip Gibbons

....
No one should downplay the crimes of Donald Trump. His erratic and demagogic behavior during the COVID-19 crisis and George Floyd uprisings, his greenlighting of police terror and white-supremacist violence, and his love of callousness and cruelty, even to migrant children, made him a real threat.

Yet compared to Dick Cheney’s crimes against democracy, Trump is an amateur. Cheney reduced nations to rubble, shredded the Bill of Rights, and enacted programs of surveillance, abduction, detention, and torture more in line with the state terrorism of military dictatorships than the norms of liberal democracy.

To venerate Cheney, as Democrats in Congress did yesterday, is to show complete contempt for democracy."

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/dick-cheney-congress-capitol-riot-january-6

The Family values of Murder Incorporated.

Economist Michael Hudson explains inflation crisis and Fed's secretive $4.5 trillion bank bailout

https://youtu.be/m7eAbbVMr_4

"Economist Michael Hudson discusses what is causing the global inflation crisis, and also how the US Federal Reserve quietly bailed out big banks in Sept 2019 with $4.5 trillion of emergency repo loans that appear to have blatantly violated the law."

'If the newspapers and media were to get into an explanation of how all this developed, they would counter the whole Democratic Party strategy of supporting Wall Street, not the economy at large...The United States government is lawless. Of course you can't trust it..."

Say it ain't so, Joe!

What should perhaps make Canadians tremble, is that the present Canadian deputy prime minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, has publicly stated that her longtime 'guru' is Larry Summer, the man who gave big banksters the greatest 'happy ending' in history by dismantling Glass-Steagall under dirty Bill Clinton , enabling the awful devouring voraciousness of bankster hogs ever-after..

MaeveReilly Retweeted

Andrew Needham

@A_NeedhamNYU

Jan 10

Map of US bombing in SE Asia during the Vietnam War. Black dots are 1000 lb bombs.

re: Summers,

Yes, Harvard. Also an ex head of the World Bank where among other things he infamously offered the impeccable economic logic of a cheaper dead third world worker vs that of a more expensive first world worker. He's also listed in Jeffrey Epstein's little black book. Classy guy.

Oops. Been removed. Wonder why?
https://liberal.ca/conversation-lawrence-summers-chrystia-freeland/