Category: World Affairs

American Empire’s Military Industrial Complex: Corporate Welfare-Centric

After decades of propping up US military manufacturers (not dissimilar to how the US government propped up canal builder, railroads and steel industries in the 1800s), it is becoming obvious that any industry subsidized this way gets very ineffective and very inefficient while never being innovative. One only has to look at recent super-large military projects like the latest carriers, F-35 and littoral class ships to see that for all the money spent, what the US taxpayer (now and in the future as the debt interest for these expenditures hits) got is of little value.

In his blog post, Andrei Martyanov writes about the F-35:

.. to shoot down F-35 one has to have two different bands radar, good sensor-fusion algorithms and decent signal processing protocols and voila’. S-300 PMU2 Favorit can do this, certainly [the] S-400 [can] ..

This explains why Israel is nervous flying near Syria these days. With customers like India and Turkey now opting for Russian build defense systems, the basic “free-market” economics are finally overriding threats from the US Empire. At the end of the day, these countries want good defense of their nation. This is something that the US has failed to accomplish for itself as it is distracted with the military-industrial complex racket that is in effect a jobs program first and the actual defense of the US is a distant priority.

Andrei goes on to explain what gives Russian military industrial manufacturers the edge:

Unlike American military-industrial complex Russian military-industrial complex is not jobs program or corporate welfare system, it never was.  Allow me to quote myself:
For a nation with such a military history as Russia’s the issue of military technology is an issue of survival. As such, weapons in Russia are sacralized because behind them are generations of Russians who shed blood to make those weapons what they are. They have become a part of the culture to such a degree that commercial considerations take a very distant second place to a main purpose of these weapons—to actually defend the nation. This is absolutely not the case in the United States, with some exception for its Navy, with Americans having no knowledge or recollection of what real war is and what instruments for fighting and winning it are needed. Those things cannot be paid for in money, they are paid for in blood.
I guess this should help explain why Russia is so successful on the international market with her weapons.
At the end of the day, the US now realizes its failed MIC projects at the same time it has alienated both Russia and Chine. Not cool. Too bad Washington DC, Pentagon and Deep State could not grasp Ron Paul’s philosophy that what works around individuals works with nations as well .. good trade (sanction free) promotes peace and prosperity .. and that the “Golden Rule” ( Do unto others as you would have them do unto you ) ain’t just for Christians, or for individual relationships, but nations as well.
Moon of Alabama’s post goes on to extend this demise to the littoral class of ships that the US Navy went all in on:

.. the incompetence of U.S. military design are the Littoral Combat Ships, which are essentially unarmed fast boats. The “stealth” DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyers were supposed to support ground troops with their long range guns. Built at $4 billion a piece the ships are now losing their guns because the ammunition turned out to be too expensive to buy. Before that they lost much of their stealth capabilities because some necessary communication equipment was left out of the original design. The ships new task will be that of a missile launch platform, a job that any commercial ship, carrying containerized Russian missiles (vid), can likewise fulfill.

Epic fails. I could write more about the latest carrier fiasco, but I digress. This is only a symptom of a bigger issues as Ian Walsh in the same post points out:

There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but for almost 40 years now America’s elites have treated the US as something to loot, and assumed that the good times would keep rolling. They were uninterested in actually governing. They were happy to move much of America’s core manufacturing overseas, to the most likely nation to replace America as a hegemon, because the Chinese were smart enough to make American elites rich.

So all these short term gains are typical in a democracy. A monarchy is actually one notch better in keeping the long-term in mind.

Alastair Crook extends this demise to the West itself when he was quoted in Moon of Alabama’s post as concluding:

as the post-war élites in America and Europe become more and more desperate to maintain the illusion of being the vanguard of global civilisation, how will they cope with the re-appearance of a ‘civilization-state’ in its own right: i.e. China?

I guess it is time to read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Democracy – The God That Failed“.  This book is pricey ($40), so an alternative is another Hoppe book I have read called “From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy – A Tale of Moral and Economic Folly and Decay” is a good read available for $4 (Kindle at Amazon) or a PDF from the Mises Library for FREE!

Placing hope in nations, in militaries and in government leaders is foolish. Time to reflect on family, faith and focusing on the local as the empire slowly dies. Maybe Ron Paul was right on a few things (quote from his book ‘Swords into Plowshares’):

“The people, who far outnumber the would-be dictators, can succeed in a worldwide revolution that fully deprives the dictators of their power. But, any revolt must not lead to just changing the name of the authoritarian system or the political parties in the system. Instead, the revolt must be based on rejecting the trust in government doing the things that only the people can and should do for themselves. This revolt will probably come in stages—in bits and pieces—and be different in the various countries of the world.”
― Ron Paul, Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity

-SF1

On US Empire’s M.O. List in Regime Change: Power Outages

History can always be used when investigating the scene of a crime. Investigators evaluate what happened and then piece the puzzle together be going back in time looking for evidence. It is hard to do on the criminal’s first crime, but when the same criminal continues their crime-spree, the investigators look for trends that help them accelerate and even be able to predict their next move.

The same can be said for the post-WWII US Empire. Within a few years it established their way of controlling the reach of the empire. It was decided that the US would not follow directly in the steps of the British Empire which tended to control other countries directly through an imperialistic form of control, but the US would use other more covert methods towards control.

Off the cuff, one thinks first of sanctions (like the US did to Japan before Pearl Harbor), and then on to propaganda to further agitate those opposed to the regime within the target country, and even using the UN to paint these countries as global lawbreakers.

Another method is going to the very heart of a country’s infrastructure that impacts everyday living to continue the agitation, the power grid.

As Moon of Alabama pointed out the other day:

The U.S. is well know for cyberattacks as well as for attacks on electricity networks. In 2012 it knocked Syria off the internet when it ‘bricked’ the central router in Syria while attempting to install malware. In 2015 it systematically bombed Syria’s power plants.

This is only the most recent concerning Syria. Do you remember what the US did to Iran’s centrifuges? This occurred about a decade ago that turned out to be a secret U.S-Israeli cyberwar strike on Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and elsewhere. The Stuxnet virus we introduced into Natanz put 1,000 centrifuges out of action, from a random worker’s USB drive as these devices were not on any network. The worm found the controlling software and inserted itself into it, seizing control of the centrifuges. Stuxnet carried out two separate attacks. First, it made the centrifuges spin dangerously fast, for about 15 minutes, before returning to normal speed. Then, about a month later, it slowed the centrifuges down for around 50 minutes. This was repeated for several months eventually causing these centrifuges to physically fail.

Unintended consequences followed as by 2010 this virus spread globally!

What does this have to do with Venezuela? Well, from the 2016 & 2017 sanctions the US placed on that country was followed up with more rhetoric during 2018. While the US is the biggest importer of the declining oil output from Venezuela, India and China come in at #2 and #2 and would be more than willing to pick up the slack for cheap oil.

The US was actually encouraged when it was announced that Venezuela would no longer sell its oil using USD in September of 2017. The decision is similar to that once made by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who dropped the dollar in favor of the euro a few years prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Countries that do this are well aware of the risks involved in shunning the US Empire.

This cycle will continue as it has in previous regime change attempts the US has engineered. I am sure the “greater good” propaganda will be flown as the citizens of Venezuela suffer, but a lot of it depends on how much truth emerges in these critical weeks before the US steps up the “need” for regime change.

This tidbit did not go unnoticed in the past few days as Moon of Alabama again points out:

When the first outage happened U.S. Senator Marco Rubio eagerly mocked the government of Venezuela. He also mentioned that some backup generators failed:

Marco Rubio @marcorubio – 22:18 utc – 7 Mar 2019
ALERT: Reports of a complete power outage all across #Venezuela at this moment.
18 of 23 states & the capital district are currently facing complete blackouts.
Main airport also without power & backup generators have failed.
#MaduroRegime is a complete disaster.

After the first outage the government of Venezuela said that it was caused by a cyberattack on the automated control system but gave no further details:

Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez said Maduro’s government planned to bring “proof” of US involvement in the blackout to a UN Human Rights envoy who is set to visit the country in the coming days.

Rodriguez pointed to the Rubio tweet:

‘How did Marco Rubio know that backup generators had failed? At that time, no one knew that,’ the Bolivarian government official asked.

The Venezuelan government should contact the Russian cybersecurity specialists at Kaspersky Lab who are well known for detecting U.S. produced malware like the one used for the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s uranium enrichment plant. Kaspersky is highly respected in the international cybersecurity scene. Should it confirm that a U.S. attack malware caused the problem the U.S. will find it difficult to deny.

Yes, since there is history, a M.O. (modus operandi – a method of procedure), it will be fairly easy to identify the US fingerprints on this. Maybe that is why, as late as today, the US now states that their “regime change” timeline is not defined.

While one thinks that an electrical outage is not a big deal, one should know that attacks on electricity networks greatly affect the civilian population with hospitals being are hard to run without electricity depending on emergency generators. This also cuts off the civilian population to the Internet, to know what is really going on in their country and in the world:

It should be noted that in the Korean War, the US bombed dams to unleash great swaths of destruction on the civilian population. The blow-back of this kind of manipulation is a civilian population that will accept a bad government over the one that is doing this. Even in our own Civil War (War Against Southern Independence), these atrocities embittered people for generations.

But Sherman’s and Sheridan’s legacy lives on in the US Empire’s tactics. Both the Obama and the Trump administration, rejected international attempts to ban cyberattacks that “indiscriminate or systemic harm to individuals and critical infrastructure”:

All members of the European Union signed the agreement. Australia and Turkey joined the United States in declining.
…
Israel, which along with the United States conducted the most sophisticated cyberattack in history, the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, also declined to sign.

Bottom line:

Why Venezuela? Why now? Well, all the indicators show that the US petro-dollar is in trouble, countries have left or are starting to create ways to leave. From this site shows those smart countries who are aware of history and making preparations:

The list of the 23 countries which are creating new swap lines outside of the dollar include China, Russia, India, and surprisingly, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. This means that the Eurozone itself is abandoning the dollar, and preparing for transition to a new central banking system.

To facilitate the transfer of currencies and swap lines, there needs to be a bank of sufficient size and stature to aid in handling of this monumental task. One year ago, China, along with the BRICs nations of Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa, loaned money to a new financial institution they established and labeled the BRICs bank. This bank was created with the intention of bypassing the dollar, and allowing free trade to occur between nations without the need to trade for dollars first, as is currently the format under the petrodollar system.

Russia, China and Iran already have their own way to trade since 2012, and attempted regime change by the US Empire in Syria was a strategic effort towards reversing this trend. These actions only make the Empire look more desperate. As Ron Paul pointed out how we got to this point:

“In essence, we declared our insolvency in 1971. Everyone recognized some other monetary system had to be devised in order to bring stability to the markets. Amazingly, a new system was devised which allowed the U.S. to operate the printing presses for the world reserve currency with no restraints placed on it– not even a pretense of gold convertibility! Realizing the world was embarking on something new and mind-boggling, elite money managers, with especially strong support from U.S. authorities, struck an agreement with OPEC in the 1970s to price oil in U.S. dollars exclusively for all worldwide transactions. This gave the dollar a special place among world currencies and in essence backed the dollar with oil.

The empires demise will probably take decades, but the writing is on the wall. Few empires have been able to willingly let go of its dominate role in global affairs. The USSR is a great example of a peaceful move towards the release of central power, just waiting for those in the US to use history to see that this might be the best way forward.

Reality is a b*tch, but learning from history can allow people groups to emerge into a better spot, but it will take a brave generation to accomplish.

Is there a generation of Americans that are up to this challenge?

Time will tell. Hang on, the surf’s up dude, we are in wild times.

-SF1

Empire Tactics: 1780 Green Dragoons/Hessians to 2019 US Special Ops/Blackwater

The benefit of knowing history is knowing when you are about to be scammed. In the past week we have heard that President Trump suddenly, without the blessing of his neo-con staff personnel, decided to exit Syria in the near-term. What happened next was typical to this empire’s entertainment aspects, people that were against war at some point in their life all of a sudden WANT war in Syria. I mean it was normal to hear most of Congress (who have been lobbied by the Military Industrial Complex – $$$) get upset that we can’t keep our “covert” war there intact since we have invested 7 years there with various rebel groups including ISIS.

It is all indeed a show, and having watched Home Alone over the Christmas break seeing Donald Trump giving advice to Kevin, we can’t be surprised in 2019 to understand that Donald Trump is still acting. All empires need good actors when they approach end of life status, it keeps the masses entertained while what is happening behind the scenes gets more and more desperate.

During the Revolutionary War, the British Empire used 30,000 Hessian mercenaries (30% of the total British force in the American Colonies) towards their attempt to hang on to their empire. Also deployed was their Green Dragoon Legions and the tactics that had local innocent citizens and their property in the cross-hairs of these forces.

During the follow-up of the Iraq invasion in 2003, the US Empire also used mercenaries in their attempt to hang on to the territory in Iraq as part of the US Empire. By 2007 there had been a huge number of incidents where these mercenaries were guilt of massacres throughout Iraq. In fact, trials are still ongoing here in 2019!

A more in depth article is this one by Chuck Baldwin who has been following closely the Trump promises before his election compared to the Trump realities to date. One of the most startling statistics is in the quote that follows:

.. the first two years of Trump’s presidency was a flagrant disavowal of that campaign promise. Not only did Trump not disengage our forces from these illegal and immoral wars, but, as I have documented, he dramatically INCREASED America’s involvement in these wars. In fact, President Trump has dropped more bombs on more people in his first two years of office than President Obama did in his entire last term in office. Plus, he sent thousands of additional ground troops to Afghanistan and Syria and several other countries.

So that leads us to Trump’s latest claim, that the US is “leaving” Syria and also drawing down troops in Afghanistan. Well, it all depends on who is doing the counting and what is being counted. Knowing full well that none of these numbers include deep state CIA operatives throughout the region, if we are talking “official military” personnel in Syria, the US claims that only 2000 are there currently. I highly doubt that. But what is really going on? Chuck says:

This month, in the January/February print issue of the gun and hunting magazine “Recoil,” the former contractor security firm Blackwater USA published a full-page ad, in all black with a simple message: “We are coming.”

Is the war in Afghanistan — and possibly elsewhere ― about to be privatized?

If Blackwater returns, it would be the return of a private security contractor that was banned from Iraq, but re-branded and never really went away.

21st century Hessians! This Empire is outsourcing the dirty work left behind by the 17 year Afghanistan conflict and the 7 year illegal intrusion into the sovereign nation of Syria that Obama pulled the trigger on.

The legacy is trillions spent, that we have a debt for, just to _______? You fill in the blank, is this to keep military contractors employed? Is this to keep the petro-dollar in placed globally? Is this to help Israel out .. perpetually?

And what of the US Empire’s legacy?

Here’s the horrifying part: These “private contractors,” i.e., mercenaries, operate in a manner that is totally unaccountable to the rule of law. Totally! They operate outside the Constitution, outside the Rules of Engagement, outside the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), outside the Law of Nations, outside law period—and also outside public scrutiny. There is virtually no accountability for whatever murders, rapes, plunderings or criminalities of any sort that these mercenaries commit.

More terrorists are home-grown the more the empire’s atrocities are known. This is “job-security” as the US Empire’s last gasp around the globe. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

In summary, Chuck Baldwin concludes:

Combining Special Forces units that are already plagued with rampant abuses of power with mercenaries who are virtually unaccountable to any human authority is a recipe for the worst kind of barbarity and atrocity. This is what the Roman Empire did during its last days of power and what Great Britain did in its failed war against the American colonies. And this is exactly what Donald Trump is preparing to do. In fact, Trump is already setting the table for an unaccountable military force by shutting down military watchdog groups, thus turning off the light of public knowledge and ensuring military unaccountability.

The “swamp” is still intact. The cynic in me points to the root of this nation’s poisonous government. Many, including Chuck claim that if we would just get back to the Constitution … yeah, it was never meant to be “got back to”. As Lysander Spooner said in the 19th century:

“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”
― Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

My thinking, thanks to Ben Stone’s efforts and his manual , has evolved to this:

When I first read this a year ago I just laughed. About six months ago I read this and still thought that maybe Thomas Jefferson was blindsided by this whole Constitution coup d’tat that happened while he was Ambassador to France. I understood that George Washington was a Federalist at heart and wanted a mini-British nation on this continent, and that Benjamin Franklin was getting old and nodded his consent. But the likes of George Mason and Patrick Henry saw through all this and rightfully noted the slippery slope that this document created a path for going forward.

I now think that Thomas Jefferson really thought that there would be another revolution inside a generation as what was created was just an “experiment”, a beta-test version 1.0 of a federated republic that would have checks and balances like nullification and secession options that could keep it grounded until another version could be tried.

I do think that the pioneer spirit of that founding generation did not even last a decade before this country fell back into its old ways. Before you know it you have George Washington taking thousands of troops into Pennsylvania to enforce a 25% Whiskey Tax to fund his government. You can not possibly make this stuff up!

Happy 2019 y’all .. I will try to stay more positive in my future posts this year, if the Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.

-SF1

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun – Ecclesiastes 1:9

Intrigued: A Ten Year Old Book Predicts a Political Tsunami – Morality Wars

The past few weeks and especially the past few days has been particularly revealing. I have said “only in 2018” so many times this year that it does seem to be the swell one sees before a tsunami. *

(* – actually, not a perfect analogy as the water rushes OUT to sea just before a tsunami hits)

It started this morning when I read this from Lew Rockwell’s fantastic site, an article from Michael S. Rozeff that has a line stating:

America used to greet bringing the boys home from foreign wars with applause. Now there is immense criticism from all components of the pro-empire contingent, who act as if the empire and Washington will crumble because 2,000 American soldiers are leaving Syria.

We are talking 2000 soldiers (if we can trust Pentagon numbers, since they failed their first ever audit and also misplaced trillions, as in, “we can’t account for that money” over the course of the past 20 years) but more importantly is the continued US and coalition efforts in Syrian airspace without Syrian permission!

But I digress, what this article then led me to, which is so intriguing to me, is the relationship between empire, religion and political correctness. I love it when society, and the human psyche can link so many things like this into the “real life” experience here in 2018. Below was my segue:

For an explanation of the relation between the empire and immoral moralism, see here.

It does look to me like I will be spending $20 for this Kindle version of Morality Wars: How Empires, the Born-Again, and the Politically Correct Do Evil in the Name of Good in order to blog about this from time to time going forward. As usual, I have a dozen or so books that I am in the middle of and they all are vying for a blog post or two to highlight my own research and my own learnings.

Here are a few excerpts:

From Amazon reviewer John Williamson, Provincetown, MA shares that the authors of this book point out:

… the US Government has long been involved in immoral actions that have often been justified using arguments suggesting that the action was being taken for moral reasons .. We learn that, “In 1783 George Washington characterized the colonies as `a rising empire,’ and nearly all the Founders saw America as destined to become one of the world’s great empires. A great deal of attention is given to examples drawn from prior empires such as the Roman empire, the Spanish empire and the British empire to name only a few ... They review also describe how the neoconservatives used moralistic rhetoric to justify US involvement in Iraq .. The argument is that PC puts limits on “the range of acceptable thoughts, seeking to outlaw or marginalize those ways of thinking that might challenge the powers that be .. Right PC uses the concept of patriotism to intimidate and silence those on the left who are critical of the war in Iraq. They are vulnerable to the criticism of being unpatriotic .. the PC of the New Left during the 1960s as well as the current identity politics of feminist, gay, and race movements. Their focus is on the ways in which these movements use PC pressures to keep certain issues off the table. For example, in connection with feminist PC such questions as: (a) Do fetuses have any rights? ( b) Or are fathers discriminated against in marriage laws and divorce courts?..

… The authors tell a story of the evolution of the American empire or more precisely what they refer to as the five American Empires: (1) The Fledging Constitutional Empire, 1776-1828, (2) Manifest Destiny Continental Empire, 1828-1898, (3) Allied Global Empire, 1898-1945, (4) The Good Empire versus the Evil Empire, 1945-1991, and (5) World Hegemon: 1991-Present. This section of the book basically reviews the many ways in which the US behaved badly – in the name of high moral ideals – like other prior empires during each of these periods.

So a clip from the book’s introduction states (remember, this is a ten-year old book):

I do not know about you, but I do see, especially since Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, quite the storm, perfect in only that there are so many triangulations involved that the average person can’t keep up and they depend on MSM or the government to explain what is going on.

I still say, there is a LOT to learn from history that helps the discerning thinker and reader to consider things that they previously had made up their mind on. Critical thinking is extremely in scarce these days, however, it is these kind of people that will be invaluable in charting the course in this storm and into the world beyond it.

This thinking will be scary to most, however, as I have said before here, a crumbling empire is a perfect environment for a grassroots, black market, underground networking of Love to give hope during and after the storm, as was demonstrated in the 1st century in the Roman Empire. It will be in that environment I do hope many can entertain a thought without accepting it as they try to adjust to a very different world.

Just thinking of my kids and grand-kids yet again, seems to be a theme .. (yes, I am not your typical “boomer”)

Stay tuned

SF1

Do Elected Officials in Representative Government Really Keep Us Free/Safe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1871&v=tclAbWvBt70

I am pretty sure most people vote to get the right people in office so that they, their family, their community and their people can enjoy safety and freedom from generation to generation. If only we get the right person in the right position .. what can go wrong?

Well, in an enlightening well documented effort, James Corbett once again weaves transcript and audio (with video graphics that paint the picture) together to bring about some understanding of WWI. I believe that this world war (called the Great War) is a good place as any to frame the problem of democracy in the short and long term. This effort also shows to what lengths a declining empire will go to in order to remain the “main thing on the global stage” even as its power diminishes.

Part 1 of this series (located at the top of this post via YouTube) is all I have listened to at this point, but it is much better than anything I might be able to dig up on History.com. Below is a clip from the transcript that includes the key of what we can still see remnants of today, a world order that was handed-off from the British Empire to a ‘3D’ US Empire (not your mama’s empire) was achieved post-WWII and is now in a state of decline and irrelevance to more and more nations around the world. Only our military, CIA and deep state threats keep the remaining nations hostage. It is only a matter of time that this New World Order (President HW Bush spoke of this openly) unravels, destroying the elite’s generational dreams of global control:

… the machinations that led to war (WWI) are a master class in how power really operates in society. The military compacts that committed Britain—and, ultimately, the world—to war had nothing to do with elected parliaments or representative democracy. When Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour resigned in 1905, deft political manipulations ensured that members of the Round Table, including Herbert Henry Asquith, Edward Grey and Richard Haldane—three men who Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman privately accused of “Milner worship”—seamlessly slid into key posts in the new Liberal government and carried on the strategy of German encirclement without missing a step.

In fact, the details of Britain’s military commitments to Russia and France, and even the negotiations themselves, were deliberately kept hidden from Members of Parliament and even members of the cabinet who were not part of the secret society. It wasn’t until November 1911, a full six years into the negotiations, that the cabinet of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith started to learn the details of these agreements, agreements that had been repeatedly and officially denied in the press and in Parliament.

This is how the cabal functioned: efficiently, quietly and, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, completely uncaring about how they achieved their ends. It is to this clique, not to the doings of any conspiracy in Sarajevo, that we can attribute the real origins of the First World War, with the nine million dead soldiers and seven million dead civilians that lay piled in its wake.

But for this cabal, 1914 was just the start of the story. In keeping with their ultimate vision of a united Anglo-American world order, the jewel in the crown of the Milner Group was to embroil the United States in the war; to unite Britain and America in their conquest of the German foe.

Yes, hatched before the end of the 19th century, this “world order”cabal was being formed behind the curtains from the world stage. The fact of the matter is, “how power really operates in society .. [what committed] the world—to war had nothing to do with elected parliaments or representative democracy..”, means that your votes really do not matter.

-SF1