Tag: wars

The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them

Guest Post by Caitlin Johnstone

The US are celebrating Veterans Day, and many a striped flag shall be waved. The social currency of esteem will be used to elevate those who have served in the US military, thereby ensuring future generations of recruits to be thrown into the gears of the globe-spanning war machine.

Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won’t be any of them left. Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil.

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Muck’s Minute #45

What the Hell’s Wrong with  this Country?

I realize that we stopped being a simple little Republic (as envisioned by those brave and smart people who composed the Constitution) a long time ago.  Slowly, the ruling classes that developed and grew – with minor setbacks like the Civil War,  have always worked to expand the influence of the United States of America across the world.  (I think it has something to do with wealth being crowded into ever smaller and higher percentages of the population – i.e. the 1%).

This current ongoing expansive effort was, of course, meant to provide Police Protection for those smaller, poorer countries that tend to be overrun by their neighbors now and then in  various fits of territorial ambition or religious clashes.  These “police actions” we get into (almost never Wars) were always in someone else best interest, never our own.  (Sure it was!)  At a minimum our military action was to “protect the world”  or something like that.

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They Aren’t Heroes. They Deserve Pity for a Life Wasted, Rather than Praise

Dying for the Empire Is Not Heroic

 

Predictably, the news media spent most of the week examining words Donald Trump may or may not have spoken to the widow of an American Green Beret killed in Niger, in northwest Africa, in early October. Not only was this coverage tedious, it was largely pointless. We know Trump is a clumsy boor, and we also know that lots of people are ready to pounce on him for any sort of gaffe, real or imagined. Who cares? It’s not news. But it was useful to those who wish to distract Americans from what really needs attention: the U.S. government’s perpetual war.

The media’s efforts should have been devoted to exploring – really exploring – why Green Berets (and drones) are in Niger at all. (This is typical of the establishment media’s explanation.)

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The First Thing We Need To Do Is Kill All The Generals

President Trump, with respect, start ruthlessly purging the U.S. general officer corps

Posted on April 11, 2017 by mike  F

 

President Trump:

Last time we discussed your refusal to abide by the Constitution’s hard-and-fast war-making provision, a decision that merits — as it did for most of your post-1945 predecessors — impeachment proceedings. Waging war in the manner you did in Syria is the work of an absolute monarch or a dictator, not that of a popularly elected president of this republic.

Today, we must discuss a topic that has been covered in this space on multiple occasions; namely, the need for you to immediately purge — via forced retirement — scores of your general officers. The American fetish for treating these officers as god-like wonders is baseless, and must be curtailed to the greatest possible extent. Among the most obvious reasons they merit forced retirement are:

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CIVIL WAR II – FOURTH TURNING INTENSIFYING (PART I)

“History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil – its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe -1997

As we enter the final stretch of this vitriolic, deplorable, venomous, propaganda saturated, deceitful, rigged presidential election spectacle, it becomes painfully obvious this Fourth Turning is careening toward bloodshed, bedlam, confrontation, and civil war. The linear fixated establishment, who fancy themselves intellectually superior to the irredemables, are too blinded by their sociopathic, increasingly audacious subversion of the Constitution, to grasp the level of rage and disillusionment of a white working class that has been screwed over for decades.

As the Wall Street shysters frantically accelerate their embezzlement of what remains of middle class wealth, with the Fed and the corporate media propagandists as their wing-men, the country devolves into a corporate fascist state. The disposition of the nation grows dark like the sky before an approaching deadly blizzard. As passions boil over and violence portends, this Fourth Turning hastens towards a bloody decade ahead with an uncertain climax.

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14 YEARS AGO – WHERE WERE YOU?

How many people have died because of what happened on this day fourteen years ago? In addition to the 3,000 Americans on that day, how many have died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, and Ukraine as a direct result of what happened that day? Those brilliant blue skies have darkened dramatically over the last fourteen years as this Fourth Turning Winter deepens by the day.

Where were you on that day and how did you feel when viewing the tragedy?


Who’s Behind All of the Wars?

George Washington's picture

Submitted by George Washington

Bankers hate peace …

Lee Fang reports:

The possibility of an Iran nuclear deal depressing weapons sales was raised by Myles Walton, an analyst from Germany’s Deutsche Bank, during a Lockheed earnings call this past January 27. Walton asked Marillyn Hewson, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, if an Iran agreement could “impede what you see as progress in foreign military sales.” Financial industry analysts such as Walton use earnings calls as an opportunity to ask publicly-traded corporations like Lockheed about issues that might harm profitability.

 

Hewson replied that “that really isn’t coming up,” but stressed that “volatility all around the region” should continue to bring in new business. According to Hewson, “A lot of volatility, a lot of instability, a lot of things that are happening” in both the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region means both are “growth areas” for Lockheed Martin.

 

The Deutsche Bank-Lockheed exchange “underscores a longstanding truism of the weapons trade: war — or the threat of war — is good for the arms business,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms & Security Project at the Center for International Policy. Hartung observed that Hewson described the normalization of relations with Iran not as a positive development for the future, but as an “impediment.” “And Hewson’s response,” Hartung adds, “which in essence is ‘don’t worry, there’s plenty of instability to go around,’ shows the perverse incentive structure that is at the heart of the international arms market.”

The President of Stanford University (David Starr Jordan) reported that banksters are the true power behind the throne, and that – for many centuries – they’ve made their fortunes by financing war.

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