Details

Published: 13 October 2017

• censorship
• police state
• social media

Those of us who aren’t still lamenting the results of the 2016 election are looking ahead to 2020. Anyone who thinks the current regime is bad had better hold on to their pearls, because things are about to get much worse. Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s richest sociopath, a man who made his fortune selling out people's pro-social impulses and friendships to advertisers and the national security state, is preparing to take the reins of power of US empire. This would be disastrous for the already-embattled concepts of free speech, privacy, and democracy.

Two years ago, there was no reason to think that Zuckerberg would go into politics. Why would he? He’s already got billions of dollars, runs one of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley, boasts a cozy relationship with the US government and owns fortified properties all over the world. What does he need more power for?

Last year, Zuckerberg announced he’d had a religious conversion: he believes in God now. Theism is an unwritten prerequisite for public office in America. While on paper we separate church and state, the majority of Americans still identify as Christians, and polls have revealed that most of us wouldn’t vote for a candidate that didn’t believe in some sort of Judeo-Christian deity. While his family is Jewish, Zuckerberg cannily realized he could go further with a vague, nonspecific Christianity - Jews are used to voting for non-Jewish candidates, but evangelical Christians would be unlikely to elect a Jew. There is no other explanation for his religious “revelation” - raking in billions of dollars a year has never once caused a person to find god. But political expediency is a powerful religious motivator.

Zuckerberg recently inserted a clause into Facebook’s charter that allows him to retain control of the company should he take a leave of absence to serve in government. He also hired David Plouffe, the campaign manager who brought Obama to victory in 2008, ostensibly to help run Zuckerberg's philanthropy. Even more bizarrely for someone who clearly loathes humanity, he spent several months during the summer traveling the country to meet "ordinary" Americans. It is telling that people at the locations of his visits were only informed an hour ahead of time of his arrival, for security reasons. In addition to bodyguards, his private jet was packed with a retinue of photographers, who meticulously documented every handshake and shared meal in Facebook posts so he could milk every last drop of public relations benefit out of these interactions. Readers of his feed were treated to heartfelt musings on the everyday obstacles faced by the salt-of-the-earth folks he encountered at rehab facilities, farms, factories, and small businesses - the same genre of bullshit we are treated to every election cycle by smarmy politicians trying to convince voters they Feel Their Pain.

In his 2016 Harvard commencement speech, Zuckerberg declared his support for universal basic income, a measure that has the potential to overcome the loathing all sane people feel when they see his smug face on their screens. As Americans are plunged deeper into poverty and jobs become fewer and further between with the rise of automation, universal basic income starts to look like our only chance for survival. Those who would vote for Zuckerberg because of this must realize his version of universal basic income looks nothing like their hopes for salvation. One condition will almost certainly be the demise of cash - this income will be distributed in a medium that irreversibly links it to one’s national ID and by extension Facebook profile. Like other government benefits - food stamps, subsidized housing - it will only be usable to pay for certain approved items or categories of items. Think of the restrictions in place on use of Facebook - the activities that get one temporarily banned, silenced or booted from the site altogether - and the laundry list of conditions placed on welfare recipients (criminal convictions, drug tests, and so on) and understand that every single one of these transgressions and more we haven’t even thought of yet will also block one from receiving that income, creating a permanent underclass of sub-subsistence individuals forced to live outside the system. Given that one percent of America's population is currently incarcerated, that underclass will be immense.

Zuckerberg’s smug sociopathy shone brightly when he strolled with sneering nonchalance down the aisle of a theater packed with VR-headset-wearing pod people. But it is his dystopian view of privacy that should really terrify anyone contemplating a Zuckerberg presidency. A Facebook administration would make the Bush boys and their Patriot Act look like amateur hour. Zuckerberg has come out as a vocal opponent of anonymity, even going so far as to state that he would like Facebook to act as an “internet driver’s license” - an identity marker that follows the user around non-Facebook sites and logs his behavior, and a technology already implemented to some extent in any site you visit that allows users to “like” or “share” posts. The US government is already developing its own “online drivers’ license,” called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Launched in 2011, the program seeks to partner with private-sector technology companies to offer users “trusted” online identity credentials for use across the internet. The program’s apologists tout its convenience and security while glossing over the new frontiers in identity theft it would open, to say nothing of the information bonanza for the national security state. Adoption would, of course, be optional - just like having a social security number is optional now. With Zuckerberg at the helm of the program, Facebook would no doubt replace NSTIC’s wishy-washy “competing private and public sector” options with its own.

Facebook’s “real name policy” has grown much stricter since the site’s inception, forcing activists and other dissidents to either provide a government ID or leave the network and forfeit the profile and connections they’ve built up over the years. The site claims the policy exists to protect users, as if anonymity is not in and of itself protective. Zuckerberg justifies Facebook’s abysmal record of privacy violations by claiming that “social norms” have evolved toward a devaluation of privacy, and that Facebook is merely reflecting the prevailing zeitgeist - then says that it was Facebook itself that got users “through this really big hurdle” of making their information public, and that he hopes the site will continue pushing users toward disclosing more information. According to Zuckerberg, users shouldn’t post what they don’t want the rest of the world to see. In other words, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. Sound familiar? If these are the views he expresses openly, one can only shudder to imagine what he doesn’t make public. Oh, right, we don’t need to imagine - we have an actual IM exchange from the early days of Facebook in which he called users “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their personal info.

There’s a reason Zuckerberg’s rhetoric on privacy echoes that of the NSA and other government agencies. Facebook has worked hand in hand with the NSA as part of the PRISM program revealed by Edward Snowden since 2009. PRISM allowed the NSA direct access to data on Facebook’s servers, as well as those of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Youtube, Skype and Apple. Zuckerberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt tacitly admitted their knowledge of the program when they both issued the same statement denying that knowledge after Snowden’s revelations were published. The NSA has claimed it only collects foreign data approved by FISA courts, but analysts admit that American data is often swept up as well; given that those courts operate secretly, and that PRISM essentially provided blanket authorization to circumvent the need for individual FISA warrants, it is safe to assume PRISM has been hoovering up all our data, foreign and domestic, since the program launched with surveillance of Microsoft in 2007. When PRISM became public knowledge, Facebook and Google were in the process of creating secure portals for the NSA to more easily access their data, and anyone who thinks the agency stopped collecting that data after the leak doesn’t understand how the national security state operates. Far from sparking a public uprising or even a change in policy, the Snowden revelations largely sank without a trace as Americans collectively shrugged, said “that’s life,” and gave up any hope of privacy. A perfunctory denial from Zuckerberg and we settled back into our comfortable routine of spoon-feeding our data to the national security behemoth.

The mainstream US media point to the Chinese government’s censorship of Facebook as evidence of its authoritarianism (because a free country would have no problem allowing CIA-backed software into the homes of its citizens to harvest data for the US national security state unhampered by regulations or protective measures). They forget that the Chinese government had good reason to ban the social networking site when it did so in 2009. Facebook has been notoriously selective in cracking down on “resistance” movements on behalf of governments around the world. They regularly come to the aid of US police departments and government agencies in targeting dissidents and other inconvenient users - to say nothing of the aforementioned “real name policy” which flags activists while leaving regular citizens who use aliases alone. More recently, they blocked Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar from posting about the brutal military campaign against them, which UN officials have called ethnic cleansing. In China, however, during the 2009 Ürümqi riots, the site refused to comply with government requests to hand over the information of Xinjiang independence activists who had been using it to communicate. Facebook has remained blocked ever since. There is no doubt China’s internet censorship is a powerful tool of an authoritarian government, but Facebook’s own behavior toward activists is hypocritical in the extreme.

Zuckerberg has been essentially fellating China ever since in an attempt to regain entry into the country’s lucrative market, but they have stood fast in their refusal. His obsequiousness has made him something of a punchline among Chinese internet users - he actually asked Xi Jinping (in Mandarin, of course) to give his then-unborn child a Chinese name. More disturbing has been Zuckerberg’s eagerness to implement China-compliant censorship in the social network, on this side of the ocean as well. Posts that don’t fit mainstream media narratives are likely to fall into Facebook’s memory hole, more so now than ever in the wake of the “Russian meddling” revelations. The site has for years come under criticism for censoring and influencing users’ newsfeeds, promoting establishment-friendly political content while suppressing alternative viewpoints and psychologically manipulating users in ways that make them more susceptible to loneliness and instability. It’s a truly genius marketing scheme - a user who believes Facebook is their only friend is less likely to turn off the social network and go hang out with their real friends. As more and more people consume their news primarily through social media, the censorious tendencies of the Facebook algorithm become a bigger problem. Trust in the US media is at an all-time low, but many Americans don’t lump Facebook in with that media, believing they are receiving unfiltered content from their “friends” whom they do trust.

Are there roadblocks to a Zuckerberg presidency? Sure, but nothing $70 billion (and climbing) in personal assets won’t fix. He was briefly in trouble when it came out that a Russian company called Internet Research Agency bought $100,000 worth of ads on Facebook, supposedly to influence the 2016 election (whether this was before or after Russia “hacked” said election is not mentioned - the media seems to be hoping that particular preposterous allegation will quietly go away). A total of 3,000 ads on various issues, linked to 470 fake accounts now shut down, would represent literally the first morsel suggesting the year-long “Russian meddling” hysteria has any parallels with reality, even though the ads did not mention candidates’ names and thus are not covered by the law prohibiting foreign governments and citizens from spending money to influence American elections (and buying ads does not even approach the level of meddling the US perpetrates during other countries’ elections, and Internet Research Agency is not the Russian government). Zuckerberg, for his part, said after Trump’s win that the idea that “fake news” swayed voters was “pretty crazy” and that “both candidates were very unpopular” - a case of a broken clock being right twice a day, but anathema to the greater media narrative. He has since revised his stance, vowing to hire 1,000 new employees to review ads before they are posted and asking for “forgiveness.” Case closed!

(Not) paying taxes has sunk many a lesser man than Zuckerberg, and Facebook may owe as much as $5 billion to the IRS after undervaluing its assets as part of a popular tax dodge called the “Double Irish,” but there has been no action on the matter a year after the two parties went to court and it seems likely this will go away as well. Worse, “Facebook vs. the IRS” could be framed as a stand against government overreach, a David and Goliath narrative strengthening Zuckerberg’s admittedly nonexistent connection to the Tea Party crowd. Never mind that Facebook will have more money than the IRS by 2020 if it doesn't already.

Adding insult to the injuries of hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, Zuckerberg recently released a demonstration of Facebook’s virtual-reality function showing an avatar of himself touring the devastated island; rather than use the opportunity to call attention to the urgent needs of Puerto Ricans, he merely extolled the virtues of the new function. One could argue this was the purpose of the video, but in that case why set it in Puerto Rico at all? Why engage in disaster-porn voyeurism when he could project his misshapen little avatar literally anywhere else?

Humans are creatures of habit, and social media is no exception to this rule. But if we want to live as free beings, we need to break the Facebook habit. Every Facebook user knows by now that the network sells users’ information to advertisers, and more people are learning every day about the central role the CIA played in making the site the behemoth it is today, yet people persist in using Facebook because that’s where their friends are. It is time to change that. We need a mass migration to another platform, one not controlled by a megalomaniac living out his revenge-of-the-nerds fantasy at our expense.

There are plenty of alternate social media sites, some of which allow you to transfer your entire profile from Facebook with one click. I have an account on minds.com and am building profiles at steemit.com, joindiaspora.com and gab.ai. Other suggestions welcomed. I propose a mass migration to another platform - ANY platform, though I’d like to hear suggestions as to which non-Facebook, non-Twitter platform people prefer.

Details

Published: 04 October 2017

• police state
• foreign policy
• gun control
• military-industrial complex
• cognitive dissonance
• hypocrisy
• mental illness

I held off yesterday on posting about the Las Vegas shooting, perhaps naively thinking that as more facts emerged the event would start to make some sense or at least fit into some kind of larger narrative. Of course this did not occur; the whole thing embodies the concept of “senseless violence,” & I’m truly horrified by the scale of the carnage.

Incidents like these invariably trigger calls for gun control, even when the facts don’t fit the standard narrative of a dangerous madman acquiring an arsenal of weapons through legal channels because of America’s freewheeling gun culture. I don’t think stricter gun control laws are the answer to the mass-shooting problem. The shooter in this case did not acquire his weapons legally - nor have many of the other shooters in recent years. That being said, the fact that there ARE “many other shooters in recent years” points to the fact that there is definitely something wrong with a society that can be counted on to reliably produce these incidents time after time.

I do believe mental illness plays a major part in the problem, though not the kind of mental illness that can be tidied up by bludgeoning neurotransmitters into submission via antidepressants & other dangerous unproven “cures.” It’s more of a cultural sickness, a mass cognitive dissonance induced by a steady stream of messages that we as Americans have it better than everyone else - that we are living the democratic dream, that we can achieve anything we want to in this land of opportunity, etc. - when this narrative runs up against the cold hard reality of living paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by in a job we hate, paying extortionate rent to a privileged class who thanks to the “free market” is free to charge whatever they want regardless of the average person’s means (let the average person live 5-to-a-room in glorified rabbit warrens, or supplement their meager income renting out their closet on airbnb), unable to buy a house or save for retirement or take a vacation or any of the other hallmarks of what used to comprise the American way of life. If this is the land of opportunity, where’s ours? We feel like whiners if we complain, & losers if we don’t. I’m not surprised people snap. I’m surprised so few do.

I can’t pretend to know why someone would commit such a senseless & horrific act (& as other articles have pointed out, white shooters like the one in Las Vegas somehow always get the benefit of the doubt not given to their nonwhite counterparts) but the undercurrents of resentment, rage, & despair in American society are palpable & bound to end in tragedy especially when automatic weapons are thrown into the mix. Desperate people do not act rationally. The same impulse that has driven an increasingly large segment of the population to medicate themselves into oblivion with opioids and other tranquilizers finds its expression in violence for others. Some turn inwards, others lash out. These are expressions of the same sickness.

As a country mired in an endless war against a nebulous, ever-shifting enemy, our fetishization of military violence only compounds the problem. The military-industrial complex is the only growth industry this nation has left; everything else has been sold off or outsourced to cheaper locales in the rush to globalization. Our defense budget is larger than that of the next ten countries combined. Just this year’s $80 billion increase in the Pentagon budget is enough to make public college free for all Americans. We send what might politely be called “mixed messages” when we dehumanize the residents of the Middle East, murdering civilians with endless drone strikes but calling our actions “nation building” and expecting to be welcomed as liberators by the people of whatever country we’re bombing. We hold ourselves up as a shining light of democracy while funding more than two thirds of the world’s dictatorships and running a pay-to-play political system at home. We wear our hypocrisy as a badge of honor, yet are baffled when any chickens return home to roost.

Should we be proud as a country to have more guns than people? No, it’s absurd. But when one looks at our hyper-militarized occupying army of a police force, the amount of guns owned by ordinary citizens makes a lot more sense. We are under siege. We can’t be blamed for wanting to defend ourselves. Every day, more reports emerge of police abusing their power and the citizens they are tasked with serving and protecting. From the murder of unarmed civilians, including children and the mentally ill; to confiscation of property without a trial or even a charge; to the matter-of-fact slaughter of harmless household pets who show their faces during SWAT raids; to horrific violations of dignity and bodily integrity running the gamut from dehumanizing roadside strip-searches to straight-up rape, the crimes of the police are legion and much more disturbing than those committed by civilians because the police are so rarely prosecuted. Gun control advocates are fooling themselves if they think a disarmed populace would be treated more fairly. The possibility that the civilian a cop is harassing might be armed could be the only thing that saves his or her life. Bullies don’t suddenly stop bullying when their victims stop fighting back. SWAT teams are being used to serve child support papers. The responsibility for de-escalation rests with the police force.

I don’t have an easy solution to this problem, but I think the answer starts with demilitarizing America, both at home & abroad. This constant state of war is literally driving us crazy. It has to end.

Details

Published: 26 September 2017

• manufactured controversy

How do you distract the American people from the impending downfall of US hegemony, the coming economic chaos wrought by the disintegration of the petrodollar, the unflinching march toward World War 3 spurred on by decades of geopolitical bullying masquerading as foreign policy, and the US’s refusal to clean up its own mess? Why, football, of course. More specifically, you undermine their confidence in the warm fuzzy patriotism of football, by extension throwing their entire self-concept into question and forcing them to re-evaluate everything they thought was good and true in the world. Order out of chaos - it’s the American way.

Every media outlet on earth seems to be weighing in on the Great NFL Protest, which after Donald Trump’s attacks on ex-49er Colin Kaepernick has spread through entire football teams and into other sports including basketball. Even media outlets that don’t cover sports are jettisoning stories that actually matter in their pursuit of this catniplike mix of pro sports, celebrity, and the great orange sun around which our media is determined to orbit. This is exactly what Trump wants. As the media congregates like moths to his flame, his administration is up to all kinds of horrors in the surrounding darkness.

The choreography of this spectacle is simple. Trump's alt-right lapdogs rail against the protest, invariably using the phrase "love it or leave it" in their takedown of the "spoiled" millionaire NFL players, who owe everything they have to this country and its freedoms and are acting ungrateful by refusing to stand for the national anthem. The anti-Trump brigade predictably takes the bait, forgetting all about the president’s horrifically hypocritical speech before the United Nations General Assembly last week as they rush to call him out for his criticism of the kneeling footballers. “How dare he call Kaepernick a son of a bitch for exercising his right to free speech! Don't the 'freedoms' promised in the Constitution include the freedom to protest? Where was Trump's outrage during the Charlottesville riot?" They have already forgotten the president's UN address in which he paid fulsome lip service to nationalism, actually claiming “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone” before clarifying that such nationalistic independence in other countries was only acceptable when it aligned with US geostrategic interests.

Is Trump being hypocritical by condemning the NFL protests and calling for the players to be fired so soon after defending the free speech of “Unite the Right” rally participants? Sure, but his calling out Iran as a “rogue state” spreading “violence, bloodshed and chaos” through the Arab world while the US (along with allies Israel and Saudi Arabia) commits war crimes in Syria and Yemen and funds terrorist groups responsible for infinitely more carnage is hypocritical on a much more monstrous level. Trump calling Kim Jong-un’s six measly nuclear tests a threat to civilization while the US carries out thousands of its own nuclear tests - to say nothing of his refusal to negotiate with the North Korean government until it disarms, a condition which would leave the country defenseless yet surrounded with US missiles - is monumentally hypocritical. Trump’s criticism of Iran for its alleged noncompliance with the 2015 nuclear deal while US ally Israel has not once had its own nuclear weapons inspected or even inventoried is astronomically hypocritical. By allowing themselves to be distracted by this easy-bake insta-controversy, anti-Trumpers are proving themselves useful idiots. Get your priorities in order, please, before Trump literally gets away with murder.

Every two-bit “intellectual” in the blogosphere has used the NFL controversy as a springboard to proclaim their own superiority to the American masses - prefacing their opinions with disclaimers that football is beneath them, that they look down on pro sports, that they are too smart for this sort of thing, but they feel the need to comment anyway. I may appear guilty by association, but this post is an analysis of media (over)reaction to a tempest in a teapot clearly meant to distract from several larger and more troubling narratives, and the question of whether or not I watch football is irrelevant. A vast segment of the US population does watch it, and the national anthem controversy serves as perfect media flypaper - a devastating weapon of mass distraction.

The controversy also diverts us from examining our government’s role in rebuilding Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Americans are mostly unaware of our uncomfortably colonial relationship with Puerto Rico, whose citizens are not able to vote in US elections despite the territory being under full control of the US government. Decades of extortionate economic policies, including the Jones Act prohibiting foreign ships from unloading cargo on its shores, have plunged the island into $72 billion in debt, the effects of which have been exacerbated by US-imposed neoliberal austerity measures. Forty-five percent of the population lives in poverty - and this was before the storm.

Most US politicians, safe in the knowledge that Puerto Ricans are electorally incapable of holding them accountable for throwing the island under the bus, are uninterested in spending hurricane relief dollars on rebuilding the ruined territory. Immediately following the storm, Trump criticized Puerto Rico for its debt crisis and aging infrastructure in a series of jaw-droppingly insensitive tweets, and he has yet to even send a disaster aid request to Congress on Puerto Rico’s behalf, despite pleas from the island’s governor. While he has ordered some federal assistance, which will cover grants for home repairs and temporary shelter, Trump refused to suspend the Jones Act and allow foreign aid to flow in, and concerns remain about how to pay for aid to the debt-ravaged territory. A referendum earlier this year revealed that 97% of Puerto Ricans favor statehood, but no further action was taken at the time. This vote - the fifth such referendum - seems destined to be tabled like its predecessors, eclipsed by the hurricane's chaos, leaving the island an impotent colony subject to the whims of the US government.

Other stories falling by the wayside in the frenzy to dissect the minutiae of the NFL protest include a new treaty to ban nuclear weapons approved by 120 countries and signed by 42 nations so far. While nuclear-armed powers including the US have opposed it, the new ban’s supporters believe the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - now 50 years old and missing several nuclear-armed powers as signatories, including Israel, India and Pakistan - does not go far enough. When 50 countries have signed the pact, it will go into effect, barring signatories from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, or otherwise acquiring and stockpiling nuclear weapons. Supporters cite Trump and Kim’s belligerent rhetoric as a major motivator behind treaty negotiations.

Trump’s staff are in 24/7 damage-control mode as he uses his Twitter platform to poke the North Korean hornets’ nest; Kim and his staff have read the president’s tweets as open declarations of war and have had to be talked down by long-suffering White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Trump seems determined to tweet the US into nuclear war, most recently boasting that North Korean leadership “won’t be around much longer” if it keeps up its “threats” - fighting words backed by US bombers flying the furthest north of the Korean de-militarized zone yet this century. North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong-ho answered the tweet by threatening to shoot down US bombers outside North Korean airspace. The rest of the world remains on high alert as both sides exchange rhetorical volleys, fearing the dispute could turn ballistic at any moment. But Trump doesn’t want Americans to worry their pretty heads about getting blown up in a nuclear strike, so let’s focus on a few football players “disrespecting” an inanimate object instead.

How do we know this controversy is a setup? Timing is everything. Kaepernick has been kneeling for the national anthem for over a year in protest of institutionalized racism. Michael Bennett joined in earlier this month because of his own experience with racist police. But why have so many other players suddenly opted to take a knee before the game? Did they all experience a crisis of conscience at the same time? Since his inauguration, Trump has proved himself quite savvy in the art of generating political theater in order to distract the American people from his administration's faults and failures. By calling Kaepernick a “son of a bitch,” he united footballers’ sentiment against him, growing the protest from a few players kneeling in opposition to racism to a large group of players rallying to the defense of a colleague. By framing the players’ support of Kaepernick as “anti-American,” Trump has parlayed a garden-variety Twitter insult into a media virus.

If you support the players’ protest, this controversy is great! Other players - particularly in sports outside football - joining Kaepernick’s protest is great! Trump revealing his hypocrisy, trying to quash protesters’ free speech with demands that they be fired, is great! Let’s discuss something else. We’re staring World War 3 in the face right now. US foreign policy is a disaster, and our economy is poised on the brink of utter destruction. Puerto Rico is a mess, and it’s our government’s responsibility to rebuild it. There are matters that deserve your attention much more urgently than the protest actions of pro sports players.

If you oppose the players’ protest, this controversy is also great! Your president agrees with you! NFL ratings are down eight percent! Americans are fleeing the sport in droves! You’ve discovered the sordid truth about “America’s sport” - that it’s not the bastion of patriotism you once thought it was - aren’t you glad you’ve escaped such deception? Let’s discuss something else. We’re staring World War 3 in the face right now. US foreign policy is a disaster, and our economy is poised on the brink of utter destruction. Puerto Rico is a mess, and it’s our government’s responsibility to rebuild it. There are matters that deserve your attention much more urgently than the protest actions of pro sports players.

I hope this “controversy” causes American football fans to rethink their love of the sport. I hope they opt to use the time they spent following, watching and discussing “the game” to read a book or otherwise improve their minds. As a student of human nature, however, I find this possibility extremely unlikely. Could the backlash to this protest put a damper on cities’ eagerness to throw taxpayer money away on the construction of boondoggle stadiums like downtown Brooklyn’s hideous blight-bringer Barclays Center? As America’s infrastructure crumbles, municipalities still find the money to fund the construction of expensive, unnecessary sports arenas, gifting billions of dollars in funds and tax breaks to teams and management organizations that are already filthy rich. This practice must end. Our cities cannot afford to subsidize the lifestyles of the rich and shameless while our bridges and tunnels disintegrate and American citizens - in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida or other pockets of dire poverty like Camden and Detroit - languish without basic shelter and necessities.

Professional sports are irrelevant to the lives of the vast majority of Americans. There is no reason to continue covering this inconsequential story while the world inches closer to nuclear war. We don't need to spend our days in a state of panic, but we cannot allow manufactured controversies to distract us from our reality.

Details

Published: 15 September 2017

• police state
• war crimes
• color revolution
• regime change
• world war 3

[TL;DR? available in video form]

As we stand at the threshold of World War 3, it can be difficult to figure out which vice drives America above all others. For a country which was founded on such lofty ideals, our descent into iniquity is all the more painful to behold.

Is it hypocrisy? We never tire of pointing out territorial expansionism and imperialist tendencies in others. Americans were the loudest voices criticizing Putin when he annexed the Crimea following the area’s Ukrainian residents voting in a referendum to join Russia. The decision was framed as a warlike act of imperialism, a violation of the right to self-determination of Crimeans, despite the fact that 90% of voters in that referendum chose to join Russia. On the US side, we have Puerto Rico, an administrative commonwealth of the United States whose residents cannot vote in the country’s elections. A recent referendum on statehood revealed over 97% of Puerto Ricans were in favor of statehood, but no action has been taken, and they continue to languish in legal limbo with fewer democratic rights than a convicted felon.

Is it greed? The story of the 2008 financial crisis need not be told again, and other countries were involved besides the United States, but only we chose to reward the criminal too-big-to-fail financial institutions with $700 billion, refuse to jail or even fire most of the perpetrators, and basically continue down the same bubble-laden path that got us into the mess. The $700 billion gifted to the banks by TARP was only the beginning of the no-strings-attached bailout (the few regulations which made it through the legislation process were toothless and laughable) and Wall Street has not changed its business practices since the crash. London, too, saw a few token firings and fines, but the city of London does not pretend to be a free-market haven of lifting oneself up by ones’ bootstraps. The US claims anyone can make it - that our economy is a meritocracy - then picks up the losers when they fail, fail big, and fail with other people’s money. If you have the right connections, you are not only allowed to ruin the average citizen’s life - you are rewarded for it.

Is it belligerence? Since the death of JFK and the rise of the CIA, it seems America has never met a country it didn’t want to bomb, overthrow, or otherwise meddle with. From regime changes and neoliberal economic imperialism in South America to supporting and training Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in the Middle East to propping up murderous dictators in Africa, US foreign policy makes sure our weapons get around. We demonize any head of state who dares conduct his own missile tests or defend his country, but we give ourselves wide latitude to kill at will.

Is it hubris? The US seems to think that not only is it always correct in geopolitical or economic matters, but that it has the right to impose its view by force and that it will win any conflict, whether ideological or military. This has led to a number of military quagmires, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, in which our opponents saw things differently and continued to see them differently no matter how much we bombed them. The US is pathologically incapable of learning its lesson.

Afghanistan

US foreign policy truly crossed the rubicon in the aftermath of September 11th. Even if you believe the official story, you must admit the event was expertly manipulated to create favorable circumstances for both the military-industrial complex and the national security state - it certainly looked like they had been preparing for just such an attack. Indeed, the documents of the Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative group, cite just such a “new Pearl Harbor” as a necessary condition for pushing through the Patriot Act and other police-state-enabling legislation. This order-out-of-chaos methodology surfaces time and time again in US policy, both at home and abroad. Before the dust had settled in downtown Manhattan, we had the Transportation Security Administration conducting intrusive patdowns at airports across the country, libraries keeping records on patrons who checked out “subversive” tomes, warrantless wiretaps legalized down to the lowliest local police force, and soldiers on their way to Afghanistan to keep the world safe for democracy.

What many don’t remember about the aftermath of 9/11 is that the Taliban actually offered to turn over Osama bin Laden for prosecution - if we just gave them some evidence that he had been responsible for the attacks. Bush blustered that he didn’t negotiate with terrorists and continued with the invasion. If the US government was so certain - and they certainly acted as if there was no doubt - that bin Laden had masterminded the attacks, surely they could have pacified the Taliban with a shred of evidence or two without compromising their case. After all, bin Laden was an Afghan citizen and a foreign government can’t just extradite a foreign national without some sort of evidence that there is a case against him. But the US does not feel itself bound by international law. As the world’s greatest hypocrites, we demand that all other countries follow it to the letter while flouting it ourselves.

After the Taliban fell, the US installed Hamid Karzai as our puppet president. Karzai, the brother of notorious opium trafficker Ahmed Karzai, ran a notoriously corrupt government dogged by accusations of election fraud, among other crimes, and was openly despised by the Afghan people. Despite the high-minded rhetoric of the Bush administration, which assured Americans we would be hailed as liberators after taking out the authoritarian Taliban, Karzai’s rule merely succeeded in driving the Afghans back into the arms of the Taliban; when they began fighting the US in the insurgency that continues to this day, it was with the help of many Afghan citizens, who saw the US army as an occupying force with no business “nation building” in their villages.

Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s opium. Under the Taliban, in 2001, opium production had fallen to its lowest level in years. Over the past 16 years, it has risen to 40 times that number. US soldiers openly stand guard outside poppy fields as the drug is funneled into the US. The opiate problem stateside continues to grow, as overdoses outpace even car crashes as the leading cause of death. Mention this link, of course, and you get called a conspiracy theorist, but a population too drugged to function is a nice, docile, manageable population. Now that fewer and fewer Americans are turning to religion, the classic opiate of the masses, it’s time to pacify them with, well, opiates.

Afghanistan was irresistible to the US military complex for a number of reasons. Its location in the center of the Eurasian continent made it strategically valuable, especially with regard to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “global chessboard” view, and as the poorest country in Asia it appeared to be ill-prepared to fight the world’s largest military. It was also ideally situated for the construction of a pipeline which would have brought oil into Europe from the Middle East while bypassing Russia, allowing the US to cash in on that continent’s energy needs while cutting out its mortal enemy. Still, they should have learned from the mistakes of the Russians - after all, it was the US which funded and trained the mujahideen in order to cripple the then-USSR - Osama bin Laden began his political career as one of the CIA’s best pupils - and it was those mujahideen who grew up to found al-Qaeda. If Russia, with all its military might, couldn’t take Afghanistan, why should we think the US could?

Worse still, and showing the world just how much we have failed to learn our lesson, the US is doubling down on its Afghan quagmire. Donald Trump, elected president on an America-first non-interventionist platform, has done a 180 regarding the war in Afghanistan, which he called a “mistake” among other derogatory names while on the campaign trail. Under the influence of the generals with whom he has packed his cabinet because of a misguided and tragic military fetish, he announced he will be increasing troop levels in Afghanistan and possibly expanding the conflict into Pakistan. Why have one war when you can have two? This is America - clearly, more is better.

Iraq

The rationale for entering the Iraq war was even more tenuous than Afghanistan, if that is possible. The US had been thirsty for Saddam Hussein’s blood ever since the first Gulf War, when we leveled the country but left the dictator in power. Congress passed a 1998 resolution officially supporting regime change, and all that remained was to find a rationale for war that would pass the smell test with the American people. When Hussein had the audacity to sell Iraq’s oil to a group of European nations in Euros instead of the hallowed petrodollar, we saw it as an act of war and stepped up the timetable. A slapdash chain of cause and effect was constructed in an attempt to link Hussein to al-Qaeda following 9/11, and we relied upon the obviously false and dubiously-motivated accusations of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi to declare the Iraqi dictator was plotting nefarious things with weapons of mass destruction. War green lighted, we swarmed into Iraq high on self-righteousness, expecting an easy victory.

Saddam Hussein was a polarizing figure. He was a brutal dictator who murdered thousands of his own people, but he was also a strong nationalist who brought Iraq into the modern age. He nationalized its oil wells and used the proceeds to modernize infrastructure and expand free education (particularly to girls). His secular regime quelled the eternal sectarian tensions between the country’s Sunni and Shi’a populations. The US had even considered him an ally in the leadup to the first Gulf War, siding with him during the Iran-Iraq War. When he prepared to invade Kuwait, Bush stood back and allowed the invasion, only crying foul after it was too late to stop. Accompanied by a heavy-handed tearjerker propaganda campaign that claimed Iraqi soldiers were rampaging through Kuwaiti hospitals, grabbing premature infants and ripping them out of incubators to die on the cold ground, the US stormed into Iraq and essentially destroyed the country. As Hussein tried to rebuild in the aftermath, he agreed to relinquish his weapons of mass destruction in return for the repeal of US sanctions, which were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children by hunger and disease.

Heavy-handed propaganda once again got us into war with Iraq, as the New York Times and other supposedly reputable outlets pushed stories of yellowcake uranium, aluminum tubes, and other specious evidence that Hussein was plotting something apocalyptic. Bush made his famous Axis of Evil speech, lumping the country in with its mortal enemy Iran and far-away, unrelated North Korea. The US military arrested, tried, and executed Hussein; Bush stood in front of a laughably premature banner and declared our mission “accomplished.” The insurgency began - the sectarian tensions quelled by Arab nationalism had flared up again in the absence of Hussein’s strongman rule - and rather than hugs and flowers we got IEDs and ambushes. No proof of WMDs ever surfaced, and the Bush administration tied themselves in logical pretzels trying to shift the rationale for war over to everything from human rights abuses (which Hussein had committed while an ally of the US during the war with Iran) to a claim of “divine inspiration” (Bush actually claimed, with a straight face, that God had inspired him to “hit at Saddam”). Realistically, analysts have suggested that in addition to control over Iraqi oil, the war was fought to establish a US military base in the region, though Iraq’s proximity to America’s bosom-buddy Israel calls that idea into question. Regardless of the real reason(s) for war, US contractors made billions rebuilding the destroyed country. We got what we wanted - never again would Iraq try to sell its oil in a currency other than the petrodollar.

Iraq also served as the springboard for the next great bogeyman in US foreign policy - ISIS. Like any drug, fear requires greater and more frequent doses in order to have the same effect. The fear of al-Qaeda experienced by the average American in the aftermath of 9/11 had dwindled significantly over the years, as constant red and orange terror alerts and 24-hour news coverage wore heavily on our cortisol system. Something new was needed to jolt us back into a properly terrorized state. ISIS is a cartoonishly evil group, kidnapping westerners, selling women as sex slaves, beheading prisoners, inducing children to behead prisoners, setting prisoners on fire, and releasing expertly-edited videos of all these acts. Not only were they brutal killers, but they were exceptionally skilled in Final Cut. Clearly, these were scary people. ISIS came onto the terror scene in Mosul, where their initial confrontation with the Iraqi army went off without a shot fired. The Iraqi soldiers, trained by the US Army (who had since returned home, cutting their losses), merely laid down their weapons and fled before this new, superior US-trained force (the CIA and Special Forces had trained ISIS leaders in Jordan).

Iraq also marked the point at which international relations began to noticeably deteriorate. Despite our “Coalition of the Willing,” those countries the Bush regime was able to blackmail or otherwise intimidate into joining in our war of aggression, the peace movement both domestic and international was massive and many countries that usually followed the US line (including France) refused to back us. Remember Freedom Fries? The Bush regime’s rhetoric - “you’re either with us or against us” - won the country no friends, and it took years of Obama’s expert lying and intellectual veneer to repair some of those relationships. Many countries still look down on us for our imperialistic foreign policy.

Libya

Libya was the first example of a unilateral act of unjustified regime change. Obama, who had sailed into office buoyed by the anti-war vote and a public sick of the Bush regime’s toxic belligerence, proceeded to out-Bush Bush, continuing all his wars and starting a few more. Some coverage has lumped Libya in with the Arab Spring - a string of nonviolent “color revolutions” beginning in 2011 that overthrew a number of authoritarian Arab regimes - but the Libyan regime change was anything but nonviolent.

Muammar Gaddafi was an eccentric but mostly beloved autocrat who had created a technologically- and socially-advanced society admired by the rest of Africa over almost 40 years of rule. His Libya saw levels of gender parity unequalled in the region, with free education and healthcare for all citizens; Libyans also received a percentage of the profits from the sale of the nation’s oil. Gaddafi had a heavy hand in dealing with dissenters and protest, but he also kept a lid on terrorism and Islamic extremism and indeed was considered an ally to the US in fighting terrorism in northern Africa. Relations between the two countries had normalized somewhat in the 10 years leading up to the invasion, with Gaddafi dismantling his nuclear weapons program in return for the easing of US sanctions. Unfortunately, in his drive to raise the standard of living for all Africans, Gaddafi proposed a pan-African gold currency for all oil-producing nations in the continent - a direct attack on US oil hegemony.

With NATO-backed no-fly zones providing cover for anti-Gaddafi rebels based in the leader’s home town of Benghazi and US dollars and weapons arming rebel forces, Libya was transformed from the most advanced country in Africa into a failed state within a year. Protests inspired by the Arab Spring centered on corruption and unemployment but were manipulated to skewer Gaddafi, whom western media outlets accused of crimes against humanity. There is still no unified government; chaos reigns as the rebel militias duke it out for regional control and the Islamic terrorism suppressed by Gaddafi rises to the surface. The country’s infrastructure lies in ruins - a state-of-the-art desalination plant that had allowed Libyans to convert a desert region into arable farmland was bombed, as were the standard targets of hospitals, factories, and wedding parties. Gaddafi was brutally murdered while Hillary Clinton chuckled sociopathically. But at least that pan-African gold currency would never come to be.

Syria

After the Libyan debacle, even the warmongering Obama was reluctant to initiate another unilateral regime change via military means, despite his administration clamoring for war in Syria. For reasons still unknown, he failed to follow through on his “red line” ultimatum, which promised military intervention should Assad use chemical weapons. Immediately after that speech in 2013, there was a chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, which the US lost no time in blaming on the Assad regime despite a paucity of evidence. UN weapons investigators eventually uncovered proof that not only were the anti-Assad rebels responsible for the attack, but the weapons had come from the US and UK; perhaps Obama’s reluctance to jump off from this fraudulent “red line” led to his refusal to intervene via an official war for regime change. Regardless of his reasons, Obama restrained his administration to funding anti-Assad rebel groups, misleadingly designated “moderate” - terrorist organizations such as al-Nusra and the White Helmets responsible for terror campaigns across the country and the lion’s share of refugees. US media paints a simplistic picture of the Syrian war in which the US-funded “moderate rebels” crusade for truth and justice against ISIS on one side and thuggish Syrian army forces loyal to Assad on the other; the reality is more of a two-sided war, with Assad and the Syrian military trying to maintain order while American and Saudi money floods into rebel terrorist groups running the spectrum from White Helmets to ISIS.

After Obama’s indecision spared Assad the catastrophe of a US ground war, Russia brokered a peace deal whereby Assad would surrender his chemical weapons. Additionally, the government held a constitutional referendum that revealed widespread public support for Assad and laid the groundwork for democratic elections. By stepping in to Assad’s defense, Russia provided a layer of protection against the geostrategic bullying of the US, forcing it to double down on the proxy war, having missed the chance to score with “boots on the ground.” Iran joined the Assad-Russia alliance, while Israel’s funding of ISIS placed it on the side of the US and Saudi Arabia. The tide of the war was turning in Assad’s favor, as US public and military opinion criticized the Obama regime’s refusal to bomb ISIS in the country (as well as its preemptive leafletings to areas that were about to be bombed, informing them of the impending bombing).

Enter Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to avoid further imperialistic adventures in the Middle East. All it took was one chemical attack under deeply suspicious circumstances to get him firing Tomahawk missiles at one of Assad’s airbases. The Trump regime tore into Assad for the attack, notwithstanding the fact that it was impossible to tell just hours after such an event who was responsible; UN Ambassador Nikki Haley even encouraged further false flag attacks by declaring that any future such attacks would be blamed not only on Assad but also on Iran and Russia. No mention was made of the illogicality of Assad using chemical weapons on his own people at this stage in the war, when he was so close to winning - as a preternaturally intelligent and level-headed leader, he would under no circumstances shoot himself in the foot in such a way. Even Israel had to admit that Assad was on the path to victory - a petulant Netanyahu complained to Putin that if Iran didn’t pull out of Syria, Israel would be forced to “defend itself” by bombing Assad’s palace. With ISIS nearly vanquished in Syria, the country has experienced a resurgence of al-Qaeda, demonstrating that the US has endless terrorist groups waiting in the wings to topple regimes it dislikes. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Venezuela

Who’s next on the US’s military invasion list? Venezuela is blinking red right now. The country has been a socialist thorn in our side ever since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999; he sharply reoriented the country from a neoliberal, pro-US and pro-Europe business paradise with levels of income inequality unequalled elsewhere in the world into a socialist country focused on ending the IMF’s austerity measures and stemming the tide of privatization. The living situation of the average Venezuelan improved markedly under Chavez’s anti-poverty programs, further irritating the US, which wanted to return to plundering the country’s oil reserves - the largest in the western hemisphere. Free healthcare, free education, and land transfer made him a very popular president until he was imprisoned during a 2002 coup. Interim president Pedro Carmona immediately dissolved the constitution and reversed Chavez’s policies, to the applause of the US, which lost no time legitimizing the coup plotters with recognition. Pro-Chavez demonstrations erupted across Venezuela, storming the palace and freeing the former president within a week. Post-coup investigations revealed, unsurprisingly, that it had been sponsored by the US, and that US groups such as the National Endowment for Democracy continued to plot his overthrow. Another attempt to oust Chavez followed in 2004 with a recall election; the majority of Venezuelans, however, continued to support their president.

Following the coup attempts, Chavez began severing ties in earnest with the US and building up the country’s military to ward off possible invasion. He made no secret of taunting the Bush regime, referring to the country as “the devil” in a UN speech and launching an oil subsidy program to supply impoverished Americans with heating oil. Following Chavez’s death in 2013, the US held its breath that his successor would return to the capitalist fold, but Nicolas Maduro continued down the road of Chavismo. The US tanked the price of oil, which represents a quarter of Venezuela’s GDP, while the country’s business interests manufactured a food shortage. With Venezuelans caught between a rock and a hard place with poverty and hunger, the US sadistically imposed sanctions, an act Maduro decried as “economic war.” Instead of buckling to the neoliberal wishes of the US, he announced Venezuela would dump the petrodollar, instead embracing whatever other currency came along - if buyers wanted to pay in rubles or rupees, yuan or euro, the US would no longer have a say in the marketplace. In effect, he called Trump’s bluff, because the sanctions do not target oil and the US still buys almost 40% of Venezuela’s oil. The Trump regime has stepped up its demonization of Maduro, claiming the recent elections are illegitimate and decrying police violence while turning a blind eye to the much bloodier and more extensive violence of the opposition. Although Trump has mentioned “boots on the ground,” analysts believe he is more likely to follow a Syria-esque line in overthrowing Maduro, funding a proxy “civil” war so as not to have to actually declare a conflict and risk the open disapproval of the war-sick American people.

An Alternative to Military Intervention

The US is not a one-trick pony, and military intervention has largely fallen out of favor as its preferred method for regime change. With the national debt creeping ever upward to the point that Trump, in the wisdom of his quasi-schizophrenic magical thinking, is actually considering discarding the debt ceiling altogether - a catastrophic move that would devalue the dollar and tank the US economy - war is simply too expensive. Color revolutions are the regime change method du jour, especially when a country is too rich, large, or well-connected to be easily toppled by a military invasion.

Color revolutions, as described by Gene Sharp in _From Dictatorship to Democracy_, are nonviolent protest movements geared toward toppling a dictator or authoritarian regime. Color revolutions begin when social groups not aligned with the regime begin protesting, airing their grievances, discussing their problems with the existing society, and encouraging each other to speak out. These protest energies are then channeled against the regime - whatever the problem of that particular group, it is presumed to be the leader’s fault. Outside funding is often channeled to these resistance movements, whether they are student groups, ethnic and religious minorities, or political opposition groups. As protests increase in size and intensity, they receive favorable media coverage and frequently attract international support while the embattled regime tends to respond with police and military crackdowns. Finally, as the protests reach a fever pitch, movement leaders stage a coup. If successful, the people are congratulated on a successful “people power” revolution and elections follow - though how democratic these elections actually are varies wildly depending on the country. Sharp’s methods rose to prominence in the wave of pro-democratic uprisings that followed the demise of the USSR, popping up in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan as well as in Milosevic’s Serbia.

Tunisia

The Arab Spring began in 2011 in Tunisia, a wealthy, secular country in northern Africa with a repressive leader known for his heavy hand with dissenters, his human rights violations, and his pro-business policies. Zine Abidine Ben Ali had ruled the country for more than 20 years as an ally of the US and Europe, but he was sacrificed to provide a blueprint for this series of regime change operations that would change the character of Northern Africa and the Middle East.

The protests in Tunisia began after a 26-year-old vegetable seller set himself on fire in the public square. Police responded to the protests with a violent crackdown, which engendered larger protests, leading to a more vicious crackdown, et cetera - this self-perpetuating feedback loop is characteristic of successful color revolutions, particularly those imposed from without, as it allows the mastermind(s) of the revolution to sit back and watch while protesters and police do all the work. As the movement grew, political figures predating Ben Ali’s government began meeting with foreign groups and non-governmental organizations to plan the future government, though they had no way of knowing Ben Ali would necessarily fall - he was cycling through many attempts to mollify protests, including promises to step down, to hold elections, to appoint one of his ministers as president, and so on. Finally, he was forced to flee, and the political parties that had been banned under his regime re-entered the political mainstream. The first democratic election in 21st century Tunisia saw the surprise victory of the Ennahda party, an Islamic group that had been outlawed under Ben Ali’s secular government. The economy subsequently cratered, as tourism dwindled to zero and terrorism became a problem for the first time. Tunisians responded by voting Ennahda out of power and electing a secular government.

The Tunisian revolution received extensive favorable media coverage, including a great deal of speculation regarding a possible domino effect- wouldn’t it be interesting, they said, if this sparked a wave of revolutions? If all the other Arab strongmen were overthrown by their people? The subtext was clear to the other Arab regimes - stay in line, guys, or the Arab Spring will come to your country.

Egypt

Egypt was the next country to fall to the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. Hosni Mubarak’s government was similar to that of Tunisia, a secular pro-business regime with a reputation for a heavy hand with dissenters. Egyptians turned out to protest against police brutality and election fraud in Tahrir Square, protests which went viral thanks to heavy western media coverage, leading the Egyptian people to believe they had truly been responsible for toppling the president. However, it was US ambassador Frank Wisner who actually made the call that Mubarak must go; Mubarak had followed Ben Ali’s line of attempting to placate protesters with promises of elections, promises he would not run again, promises to appoint some lesser minister as his replacement, and so on, but Wisner was adamant that he must step aside. Credit for his ouster was of course given to the Egyptian people.

Much more than Tunisia, Egypt exemplified the flaws inherent in color revolutions. The interim government, run by the military, wasted no time in criminalizing protest and dissolving parliament and the constitution in the leadup to the country’s first “democratic” elections post-Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was elected president, imposing Islamic law on the formerly secular country and placing himself above judicial oversight. Muslims and Coptic Christians, who under Mubarak’s secular regime had been if not best friends at least at relative peace, began clashing violently under the new hardline Islamic regime. After a year of violence and continued suppression of protest, the military, led by Abdul Fatteh al-Sisi, staged a coup and overthrew Morsi; he was later legitimized in another round of elections.

Color revolutions frequently terminate in this “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” phenomenon, particularly in countries where the government has been authoritarian for a long time. These countries lack the structures to support western-style democracies, and short of importing foreign politicians - a move that would go over like the proverbial lead balloon with political nationalists rejoicing in their overthrow of a repressive dictator - there is no real way for them to develop any rapidly enough to install them in the turbulent aftermath of a people power revolution. The risk is always great that whoever succeeds the deposed tyrant will merely take on the characteristics of that tyrant, not knowing any other way. Al-Sisi’s government resembled nothing so much as that of Mubarak, except with an even heavier hand against dissenters; protesters continued to go missing and turn up dead, and Egyptians just counted themselves lucky they had escaped the Islamic tyranny of Morsi.

Yemen

Arguably the worst disaster among all regime changes in the past 20 years has been Yemen. The aftermath of the revolution is seldom covered in US media because we are largely to blame for the suffering in that country, which was the poorest in the middle east even before the revolution. President Ali Abdullah Saleh was generally considered a kleptocrat, and the array of anti-Saleh groups ready to join the revolution was vast and ideologically diverse - from student groups to Islamic sects to political separatists to tribal alliances, all with different goals, though many linked to some form of economic justice - in a nation of poverty, they did not want to be poor.

With such a varied group of revolutionaries, it took skilled organizers to channel all that protest energy toward a unified anti-Saleh movement. Tawakkol Karman was just one such skilled organizer - she later took home the Nobel Peace Prize for her role in organizing the Yemeni revolution, which should have been a red flag when one considers that unalloyed warmongers like Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger have also received the prize. Karman spoke out against Saudi interference in the Yemeni revolution, while it was later revealed in the WikiLeaks cables that she had been in contact with the Saudis the whole time regarding their future role in the post-Saleh government - a possible reason for why so few of the revolutionaries’ concerns were addressed when Saleh finally relinquished power. After a year of protests marked by increasingly violent police crackdowns and culminating in an assassination attempt on Saleh, he handed over power to Mansur Hadi, his former Vice President. Many revolutionary groups felt betrayed by the transfer of power agreement, which carved up the country into six smaller areas. One group in particular, a Shi’a religious group called the Houthis, condemned the agreement, protesting that it would widen the chasm between rich and poor and that it interfered with the Houthis’ territorial authority - the borders of these six areas cut through a region which had been under Houthi control for many years.

The disastrous result was civil war. Saleh and his loyalists joined the Revolutionary Council founded by the Houthis, even though the Shi’a group had protested his regime during the revolution, and predominantly-Shi’a Iran also joined the struggle on the side of the Houthis; the new Hadi government was backed by the Saudis, armed with billions of dollars in US weaponry. The extreme wealth of the Saudis should have made it easy for them to crush the impoverished Houthis, but instead the Houthis were able to take the capital Sana’a, forcing Hadi to move his capital city south. Still, the Saudi blockade has resulted in massive suffering for Yemenis, with hundreds of thousands of people affected by famine and disease, mounting civilian casualties, and the rise of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda in the oil-rich region of Usaylan. As enablers of the Saudi war criminals, the US is responsible for much of this suffering; the media takes advantage of the fact that most Americans have never heard of Yemen or at least can’t find it on a map and pretends that these crimes against humanity are not taking place.

Ukraine

Ukraine holds the dubious distinction of having (temporarily, at least) operated under the only neo-Nazi regime in the world. President Victor Yanukovych, a democratically-elected if weak and corrupt leader, refused to sign a free trade agreement with the European Union, sparking protests by various right-wing Ukrainian nationalist groups in Maidan Square. The United States flooded these groups, which included such quasi-fascist luminaries as Right Sector, Svoboda, and Fatherland, with money and other support, hoping no one would notice the neo-Nazi factor. Svoboda’s Oleh Tyanhybok, for example, had called for the extermination of ethnic Russians, the second largest ethnic group in Ukraine; Svoboda and Right Sector both openly idolized the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators the Azov Battalion. US diplomat and Nurse-Ratched-lookalike Victoria Nuland called for the installation of the pro-US puppet and Fatherland party member Arseniy Yatsenyuk to replace Yanukovych, mostly because Tyanhybok was too much of a Nazi and would raise international eyebrows; Yatsenyuk, she said in a leaked phone call, could still call Tyanhybok four times a week to receive his marching orders. He lost no time in persecuting ethnic Russians, attempting to remove Russian as the country’s second official language; Svoboda, meanwhile, took a third of the seats in parliament.

Ethnic Russians in Crimea, chafing under the increased oppression, held a referendum in which 90% voted to join Russia. The US clutched its pearls and accused Putin of imperialism, expansionism, and a number of other hypocritical crimes one wonders how it could utter with a straight face. While the US imposed sanctions on Russia and its reunited province Crimea, Ukraine cut off all services to the area, leaving it with no electricity and water and even blockading the bridge separating it from the mainland. Pro-Russian and Ukrainian nationalist forces clashed in eastern Ukraine, in Donbass and Donetsk Province; the bloody unrest continues, though the international spotlight has largely moved on to demonize Putin for his perceived role in “hacking” the US elections. Unsurprisingly, Yatsenyuk’s government collapsed shortly thereafter amid widespread corruption allegations, and Svoboda lost almost all its parliament seats. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

When Regime Change Fails

Sometimes, regime change is impossible. The US does not take kindly to not getting its way. Faced with a diplomatic impasse, it throws a geopolitical tantrum, stepping up failed policies in the hope that maybe THIS TIME they’ll work. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But don’t say that in front of the US government; they’ll arrest you. When even magical thinking fails to yield the desired results, there is always the nuclear option - take your ball and go home.

Russia

Russia has been a thorn in our side since the days of the Bolshevik Revolution. No longer communist, it still rubs us the wrong way. Huge as it is, military invasion is impossible; they have nuclear weapons and plenty of conventional arms as well, and like any bully, the US is reluctant to pick on someone who can fight back. The Putin administration has witnessed many color revolutions in neighboring states (Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan) and is extremely vigilant in monitoring the opposition for the beginnings of such an uprising. There was an attempt a few years ago to start a protest movement; Putin cannily refused to legitimize it with a police crackdown, instead merely letting the resisters protest. Deprived of moral legitimacy, the movement faded away.

One avenue in which US aggression against Russia has been successful is sanctions, but even those have had mixed results. By tanking the price of oil, the US did hurt the Russian economy, which relies heavily on that commodity; elsewhere, however, the Russians merely found other markets for their goods. The most recent round of sanctions, passed over Trump’s head while he limply condemned them, have inflicted collateral damage on Europe as well, which trades extensively with its resource-rich eastern neighbor - the US can’t afford to lose any more friends, but we don’t seem to care anymore. The US is also fond of funding Islamic insurgencies around the Russian borders, in areas like Chechnya and Abkhazia and in bordering countries like Georgia and of course Afghanistan.

Our primary weapon against Russia is demonization - Putin is held up as an imperialist, with designs on rebuilding the USSR bigger and stronger than before. By accepting the (historically Russian) Crimea back into the country, he revealed his expansionist tendencies. Only the US is allowed to violate the territorial sovereignty of other nations! But most importantly, ever since the 2016 election, Putin has been held up as the all-powerful bogeyman capable of undermining democracy in the most democratic nation the world has ever seen! Clearly he has some sort of superpower. US media is pathologically incapable of admitting that the Democratic party ran a flawed candidate who could not have win even if running against a bag of flaming dog shit - it is not that Trump won, or had any redeeming characteristics; it is that Hillary lost. Few candidates in presidential history have been so loathed. A disgruntled DNC operative, witnessing the machinations of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in barring Bernie Sanders from the Democratic nomination, leaked the documents. There is no evidence of a Russian hack, and all the investigative committees in the world - no matter how much taxpayer money they waste looking - will find one. The whole process is dangerous, because it takes attention away from Trump’s actual misdeeds, which are legion. If the US media is actually anti-Trump - as his loyalists claim - why don’t they criticize him for what he is actually doing wrong instead of pursuing this Russian red herring? Are they really that stupid?

Iran

Iran has a long history with US interference. In the 1950s, they saw their democratically-elected leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, ousted and replaced with the authoritarian Shah Reza Palavi. Iranians have been on guard against US meddling in their government ever since, deterring a 2009 “green revolution” during the re-election bid by president Achmed Ahmadinejad. Bush never followed through on Iran’s part in the so-called “Axis of Evil,” having been too bogged down in the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires to launch another war, but an invasion has never been far from the US government’s mind. When the color revolution failed, the Obama regime tried a page from the Iraq playbook, offering the Iranians a trojan horse disguised as an olive branch - they would dismantle their nuclear program, discard their uranium stockpiles, and the US would relax its sanctions. President Hassan Rouhani, seen as more pro-western and moderate than Ahmadinejad, readily agreed, and has done away with most of the country’s uranium.

Unfortunately, the US does not seem interested in upholding its end of the deal - not only are sanctions still in place, but Trump has added more, in an apparent bid to goad Iran into backing out of the deal and creating a justification for war. Haley, exercising her characteristic lack of restraint and intelligent thought, let the cat out of the geostrategic bag, whining that Iran was violating the “spirit” but not the “letter” of the nuclear deal. The idea is to make weapons inspections so onerous - so frequent, so intrusive, so inconvenient - that Iran pulls out. The US does not want to be the one to violate the agreement, as if any country in the world still trusted its word, but Rouhani is not stupid and he sees what is going on. In response, Iran is backing away from the petrodollar. Trump’s generals are barking for war and he seems ready to let them off the leash. Rouhani may wish he had those nukes sooner rather than later.

North Korea

North Korea is the country on everyone’s mind these days, as Pillsbury Dough-talitarian Kim Jong-un launches missile after missile over Japanese airspace and South Korean waters, threatening the US daily in a deadly game of chicken. Clearly, the country is too well-armed for the US to invade. A perk of Kim’s totalitarian rule is the absence of a well-organized protest movement that could be galvanized into a color revolution; there are dissidents, certainly, but they are few and far between and any attempt at organizing is promptly met with the heavy hand of the police.

In the quest to demonize Kim, who unfortunately lends himself to being demonized quite easily with his pudgy frame and tendency to have family members killed, Americans forget that his actions are quite reasonable. North Korea was actually in the process of dismantling its nuclear program when Bush made his Axis of Evil speech - Kim Jong-il, then in power, saw what was happening in his co-axial nations and made the intelligent decision not to allow North Korea to go the way of Iraq or (potentially) Iran. The country is surrounded by American missiles, lined up in the de-militarized zone and on aircraft carriers in the South China Sea, and Kim’s missile tests make perfect sense in this context. The US has imposed sanctions, cutting into North Korea’s coal revenues by preventing it from selling as much of the commodity to primary trading partner China, and Kim is looking awfully lonely out there on the world stage.

This is where the nuclear option comes in. Trump, the latest petulant autocrat in a parade of petulant autocrats, is incapable of dealing with defiance. North Korean negotiators have been completely open about their willingness to relinquish their weapons if the US stands down from its aggressive posture - if it takes down the missiles targeting Pyongyang, removes the aircraft carriers just off North Korean waters, and in general plays fair. We’ve established the US does not like to play fair, but even South Korea does not want war - largely because if the US were to launch a “preemptive” “tactical” nuclear strike (I place the other words in quotes because they do not in any way diminish from the seriousness of using NUCLEAR WEAPONS against a SOVEREIGN NATION), Kim would almost certainly fire off a few missiles of his own at Seoul and Tokyo before the bomb hit. Weapons experts don’t know whether Kim’s arsenal is capable of delivering a nuclear payload to, say, New York or Washington, but I think we can agree that this is not the way to find out. The US needs to grow up and solve its problems like a rational adult. It may not BE a rational adult, but as they say, fake it till you make it.

China

China is rocketing toward superpower status even as the US totters along on its last legs. The Xi regime recently announced it will start trading oil in yuan, and China has come off a recent conference with the other BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa) with a plan to create a gold-backed multinational currency for the purpose of trading oil without having to go through the belligerent, dysfunctional US. One must congratulate China on forcing the US to taste its own medicine. The country out-produces, outnumbers, and out-arms the US but lacks America’s taste for overseas adventures, making it much more popular among neighbors near and far. Expansionist adventures in the South China Sea are somewhat exaggerated, though the US will always side with Taiwan in any dispute. Indeed, the US encourages and funds any opposition it can find, since there’s no chance that a military intervention against China would succeed. A 2011 attempt at a color revolution flopped, however, with Xi’s police effectively crushing the movement before it attracted any real support. The so-called “Jasmine revolution” (lesson learned: never name your revolution until you’re sure you actually HAVE a revolution, or it just looks embarrassing) began on an overseas message board for Chinese dissidents and no single protest attracted more than 200 would-be revolutionaries. When police began cracking down on the gatherings, protesters were told to hold off on actually, you know, PROTESTING and to instead merely file meekly through the square, preventing anyone from discerning who was even protesting and ultimately dooming the movement.

Sanctions, of course, would backfire hilariously. The US owes China trillions of dollars. All Xi would need to do is call in his debts and the US economy would collapse like the house of cards it most definitely is. And with China, we can’t simply take our ball and go home. They have nukes too - lots of them - and they can certainly hit the US. They also have allies - a lot more friends than we do. The US would be crushed in any sort of conflict with China, but their actions strike at the very heart of our global hegemony. There cannot be two superpowers on this playing field. China is clearly on the rise even as we slide downhill. The situation is at least as precarious as anything during the Cold War - once again we have the US as the unhinged mental patient with its finger on the nuclear trigger, willing to blow up the planet for the slightest perceived infraction. China, and to a lesser extent Russia, are the adults in the room, trying to calm down the dangerous nut before he takes us all down with him. The people of the world are held hostage.

Order out of Chaos?

We can see now that no US intervention, military or people-power, has ever led to a functioning western-style democracy. Instead, we have spread chaos and death wherever we go, frequently taking functional and progressive societies and turning them into violent shitholes. This is in line with the “order out of chaos” policy, the same notion that gave us the Patriot Act - basically create a state of total desperate chaos, destroy all structures (literal and figurative) within a society, leave the people grasping for something to hold onto; then step in to save the day with a government or organization that the people would in better circumstances find politically or morally repugnant. In the US, the government shattered Americans’ perception of safety and untouchability with the murder of three thousand people in an extremely cinematic event that will forever be burned into our collective consciousness; we responded by allowing our freedoms to be flushed down the toilet, embracing the illusion of security while the reality continues to elude us. In Egypt, they convinced the people that their own protests had deposed a repressive regime, then pulled a bait and switch with an even more repressive leader who added religiosity to the oppression. In Afghanistan, they took out the government and forced a corrupt and fraudulent “democratic” process on the people - Afghans know their votes are meaningless, but they vote under the direction of an occupying army that guards their poppy fields and ships the opium back to the US, ensuring they don’t even profit off that.

If US intervention never leads to a stable functioning democracy, does this mean we’re just doing it wrong? Is the US military-industrial complex criminally incompetent, or just criminal? If this was truly a failure of policy - if all our interventions had merely backfired, accidentally creating chaos and repressive regimes - surely we’d have accidentally created a democracy by now! Even a broken clock is right twice a day! But this is not a failure of foreign policy. This is unqualified success. We set out to destabilize the Middle East, and destabilize we have. The region is now safe - for US corporate interests, for other multinational firms, for US allies Israel and Saudi Arabia, which hate competition and want to see their neighbors bombed back into the stone age.

Color revolutions, while generally less violent than military interventions, similarly lead away from democracy in most cases. As mentioned earlier, these revolutions take place in countries that have little to no experience with democracy and lack the structures to support it. The temptation to fall into old patterns of corruption and repression is immense. It’s easy to hold a democratic election but hard to govern democratically. Additionally, protesters, experiencing the rush of success that comes from toppling an autocratic regime, tend to relax once the dictator is out of power. This is exactly the wrong time to relax. Pressure must be maintained on the new regime so that they do not backslide and become that which they replaced. Otherwise, it’s an endless cycle of meet the new boss same as the old boss, and all the effort of the revolution is for naught.

What the US has accomplished in the last 20 years is pitiful. Aside from millions of corpses, both combatant and non-, we have squandered the political good will we had previously built up over the centuries. The US began its life as a nation founded on admirable ideals - the concepts of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion had not hitherto been used as the basis for a country. It was extremely rare for the average citizen to be able to send a representative to the halls of power to vote for his interests. Hundreds of countries adopted various elements of the US government over the years, democratizing and opening their own nations. We were a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world. Now, we are a nation governed by war criminals, a nation that spies on its own people, that criminalizes whistleblowing and other forms of dissent, that sees nothing wrong with murdering our own citizens with drones halfway around the world without the benefit of a trial, or confiscating property without charging its owner with a crime, or locking people up for the rest of their lives for nonviolent drug offenses. We continue to propagandize our children, telling them that Americans are the good guys, that the government only wants what’s best for you and the world, that our army is out there helping people and fighting for truth justice and the American way, and that voting accomplishes something. Basically, we lie. Lying is really our national pastime. We lie to ourselves, we lie to others, we live in denial and refuse to honestly examine ourselves. When misfortune befalls us, we always blame the other - it is not possible that we can be wrong - that our government has spent the better part of a century going down a very wrong road, stripping us of the freedoms that once defined our great nation and rendering us a nation of disenfranchised serfs laden with crippling levels of debt and a ruling class that exploits us and expects us to pay for the privilege. The concept of “democracy” has been hollowed out and perverted in service to this disgusting state of affairs. The term has become meaningless.

Trouble at Home

America is broke, morally and financially. We have wasted trillions of dollars on these wars, leaving the nation in a disastrous state, with decaying infrastructure, no jobs, no future to look forward to, healthcare and education systems that resemble nothing so much as a bad joke, and a corrupt political class that cannot be removed through the traditional means of voting. We have been “meet the new boss same as the old boss”’ed twice in the last ten years, with Obama riding to power on anti-war sentiment only to start even more wars than Bush, and now Trump ascending on an America First platform only to dump that for Afghanistan and Israel First. Is it any wonder that there seems to be a color revolution taking place right here at home?

Groups like Antifa and By Any Means Necessary have one fundamental difference with the standard Sharp color revolution, however - they do not shy away from violence. Sharp advises against the use of violence primarily because the state has a monopoly on it - the regime owns the army and the police and will necessarily win in any armed confrontation. Instead, revolutionaries are advised to approach the government on a nonviolent platform in which they can be more evenly matched - or even outmaneuver the regime. Otherwise, though, the stage is certainly set for a color revolution. In addition to the dedicated anti-Trump groups, you have other protest movements like Black Lives Matter that began as a response to the murder of unarmed black civilians by police officers but now seems to have aligned itself with the anti-Trump movement. You have various feminist groups that have also thrown their hats into the ring. You have the dubious, nebulous leaders funding movements like Antifa that seemed to come out of nowhere after the election and whose roots can’t be traced. These movements are suspect because until we know who is funding them we do not know where the revolution is driving - or who’s driving it. This is extremely important. We do not want the anti-Trump protest energy to be coopted to further yet another criminal agenda. We do not want to be dupes, like the protesters in the revolutions in Egypt and Yemen.

Most importantly, any revolutionary must keep in mind that it is not Trump who is the problem. Trump is a symptom of the problem - the most visible symptom of the problem, yes, but the system that created Trump is the source of the oppression. The ruling class and its attack-dogs the military-industrial-police complex are the ones robbing America blind to fund these foreign adventures, beef up their stock portfolios, destabilize nations, and collect rewards. We are nothing but cattle to these people. They do not expect cattle to rise up. Take the element of surprise and run with it.