U.S. Stock Market Traders Easily Manipulated By Crude Grifter Trump

We hear a lot of chatter about how Trump's mad tariff war on the entire world has wiped out wealth that was stored in the stock markets.  But what I haven't noticed is media attention to how easily Trump causes sharp daily rallies in stocks with a mere feint, a head fake of a comment implying some fabulous resolution to the tariff war he's started with the rest of the world that's going to happen. (When? Don't ask.) Starting with announcing a 90 day "pause" in imposing tariffs (excluding, crucially, China), having his Treasury Secretary, Scott "The Stock Market Whisperer" Bessent play Good Cop and periodically claim that "talks" are imminent, or maybe happening, or going to happen, or "a lot" of countries have "called" (always refusing to answer the question, "How many countries have called?"), and Trump making various vague statements that stock speculators for some strange reason find reassuring, like crying babies being shushed by having a pacifier stuck in their mouths, Trump and his accomplices have shown themselves able to cause sharp stock market rallies repeatedly over the past month. The low point for U.S. stocks was on April 8th, but since then the S&P 500 is up over 8% midday today, and the Nasdaq is up 10%, over 1,500 points. So for just over two weeks stocks have basically been in an uptrend, with ever sharper up days. 

Bessent was at it again today, opining that both U.S. tariffs on China and vice versa had to come down before talks could begin. (Notice the U.S., that is Trump, hasn't actually LOWERED the tariffs to facilitate talks. I guess they want China, which has lower tariffs (125%) on U.S. goods versus the 145% imposed on China by Trump, to go first. 

Here's an example of what a bamboozler Trump is, and how utterly STUPID U.S. financial markets are- that is, the people trading stocks all day, every day, are.

Today, Trump at about 11:20 am East Coast time, spewed a spray of empty blather about how great everything is going to be, how rich America is going to be, how "happy" everyone in the WORLD is going to be. Stuff he says year after year, just shilling as this grifter con man always does. But here's the key tell, to use a poker term:

Trump: "We are going to have a fair deal with China."

Reporter manages to inject a question into the Trumpian stream of consciousness rave: "Are you talking to them actively?"

Trump: "Actively? Everything is active." And he keeps talking, but not about China or negotiations or anything at all, just his usual repetitive upbeat con man blather. Notice how he evaded the question. The tell is that he dodged the question. He didn't say "Yes, we are talking to the Chinese." 

The U.S. isn't even in negotiations with China while exorbitant tariffs remain in place. (145% tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese imports, 125% ones China imposed in retaliation on U.S. imports to China.) Plus, Trump still won't stop lying and claiming that the tariffs will be paid by Chinese companies. That's not how tariffs work. Tariffs are paid at the point of entry to a country, paid by the importer. That is, whatever comes from China will be 145% more expensive for the U.S. importing company.

But the people who trade stocks apparently don't understand any of this. They are pushing stocks up hard today, as they also did yesterday. Another "reason" is not just what is misinterpreted as a softening of Trump's position on tariffs, or progress (!) in non-existent negotiations, but the fact that Trump changed his tune on Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, who he had been publicly attacking for days because Powell isn't lowering interest rates. (Another Trump distortion of reality- the chairman of the Fed cannot raise and lower interest rates on his own. That requires a vote by the Fed Open Market committee, on which the chairman has only one vote.) Trump had been publicly threatening to "fire" Powell, which he does not have the legal authority to do, but as we have seen, Trump has been doing many illegal things since January 20 when he became president again, or rather dictator as he prefers, including firing officials illegally. Seeing that the stock and bond markets were upset, Trump stopped calling Powell a "loser" (the worst epithet there is in Trump's mind, a product of his pathological upbringing by his sick father, Fred)  and said he wasn't going to "fire" Powell after all. Or rather, he merely said he has no "plan" to fire Powell. Like he ever needs a "plan" for his arbitrary and vengeful acts. 

Yet for some reason, this typical Trump capricious (and meaningless, if you parse it like I just did) change of rhetoric completely reassured the financial speculators, and the stock market especially has been off to the races in an oingoing so-called "relief rally." (As of noon, the rally is off the highs but still up 2% to 3% in the major averages, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq..The DOW is a mere 30 stocks, so it is silly to use it as a weather vane.)

Given the relentless bias to drive stocks always higher, and the mindless chauvinistic optimism of American financial speculators, one must always assume that pushing U.S. stocks down is as hard as pushing an inflated ball underwater. It will always forcefully push upwards. The 1929-1940 stock market drought must be seen as an anomaly in the modern era. (The completely unregulated 19th century cannot be used for comparison. In that century, there was an economic panic or crisis or depression about every decade.)

                           "What, you BELIEVED that??"

I Already Proved On April 12 That The New Coronavirus Escaped From A Chinese Lab. Now the U.S. Establishment Is Beginning to Catch Up With Me

 Six weeks ago I posted an essay that proved that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 disease originated as a leak from a Chinese research laboratory. [Link below- Footnote 1.] 

First of all, let me say that proof is a bit like beauty, in that it's in the eye of the beholder. Proof is, quite simply, that which convinces someone that something is true. We can see a cop murdering a person on video, yet to cop-lovers and other cops, the video proves no such thing. In mathematics there are agreed rules for proof. No other area has such precise rules, not even the sciences, where there is some subjectivity and interpretation. And in every other area, there are no real rules, because people ignore the basic rules of logic when it suits them, and deny or ignore facts they don't like.

Nevertheless, I made a cogent case, based mainly on the behaviour of Chinese state authorites and those under their control, that this disease-causing virus originated as a leak from the notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology lab in Wuhan, China. You need to read my original essay. To briefly summarize some of the main points:

- When Chinese doctors first spotted signs of the disease, the police threatened them with prison for "spreading rumors," which stopped an incipient medical response.

-The Chinese regime reacts violently to any calls for investigating the origin of the disease. When the Australian government called for an investigation, the Chinese immediately applied punitive tariffs on Australian imports to China.

-The Chinese regime stonewalled the World Health Organization for months on doing an investigation. When they finally allowed a WHO team into Wuhan, it was closely chaperoned and not permitted to actually investigate. Instead they were spoonfed a Chinese "investigation" which dismissed the possibility of a lab leak out of hand and instead suggested frozen food as a disease vector, an absurdity in this case.

Read the essay for more. [1]

Since I last wrote on this, more damning evidence has emerged. Three workers from the notorious Wuhan lab were hospitalized in November 2019, with symptoms of COVID-19, before the first acknowledged cases in China. (The Wall Street Journal reported this, and it was picked up by other media outlets.) And every time the Chinese react with extreme defensiveness and screech outraged rhetoric at suggestions that further (that is, actual and not performative) investigation is called for, that constitutes more evidence that they feel a strong need to hide something. That something is obviously the lab leak.

Furthermore, contrary to the false and pacifying claims by U.S. government bureaucrat Dr. Anthony Fauci and by other Americans with ties to the Wuhan lab, that lab is NOT a highly secure facility. Fauci and others have emitted a smokescreen of reassuring, anodyne, misleading statements all along on that score. The Wuhan lab doesn't operate at top level biosecurity. Leaks are common at such labs. In fact, there are at least 6 prior known escapes of coronaviruses from research labs. Four of these occurred in Beijing, China's capital, and one each in Singapore and Taiwan. [2]

We are also seeing nails put in the coffin of the alibi that the outbreak originated in the "live animal" market in Wuhan. Hundreds of samples were taken from the market. The number of positive coronavirus results? Zero. And the "live animals" sold at the market were reptiles only, which cannot be infected with this virus. Only dead mammal meat was sold there, which cannot infect humans.  [3]

Much of the resistance to accepting the apparent fact of the true origin of the virus stems from the fact that the hated Donald Trump said it. Since the Democrats and the vast constellation of media assets allied with them in an anti-Trump front felt duty-bound to oppose most anything Trump uttered, this inclined them ti dismiss the idea of a Chinese lab leak as a baseless smear. 

But not every single thing Trump says is false, as mindless Democrats and their media allies believe. I despise Trump as much as anyone, but that hasn't caused me to lose my ability to evaluate reality objectively. Trump indeed tells thousands of lies, and some number of falsehoods which he believes (telling which bits of his nonsense he actually believes is not always easy). But even Trump occasionally makes true statements. To think otherwise is irrational.

The dam of denial started to break earlier this year, when U.S. government career medical bureaucrat, former Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield said in March that  he believes “the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory." The pressure increased earlier this month when 18 prominent virologists managed to get Science magazine to publish their letter saying the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan lab deserved study.  (Science, the premiere U.S. science journal, is the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.) Exercising scientific caution, they won't say it happened until they see biological evidence. The rest of us are free to consider ALL the evidence in drawing a conclusion. As I have shown, the behavior of the Chinese "authorities" is pretty definitive in this regard.

U.S. president Biden just ordered the U.S. "intelligence community" to investigate the source of the outbreak. If the secret police had read my mid-April expose, they'd have a leg up. [4]

The government buraucrat Saint Anthony Fauci (at least that's how much of the media treats him and a large swath of the population regards him- as a saint), supple public relations man/propagandist that he is, has smoothly slinked away from his prior position that the virus DEFINITELY did NOT leak from the Wuhan lab. What he's been saying NOW is for example this stuff: "Because we don't know 100% what the origin is, it's imperative that we look and we do an investigation:" "I said I’m perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus;” “That possibility [a lab accident in Wuhan] certainly exists, and I am totally in favor of a full investigation of whether that could have happened;” and "no one knows not even I 100% what the origin is including me. That's why we favor further investigation." Not even the Great Fauci knows for sure!

Fauci is a political cat who always lands on his feet. 

Fauci is an extremely successful bureaucrat, having held the same high level position as director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly 40 years. Fauci is the guy who early in the pandemic told people masks were no good and you shouldn't wear them. Asked to explain this later, when he took the diametrically opposite tack, he said "we" were worried about mask shortages for medical personnel. In other words, he'll be dishonest in order to manipulate the public. We are people to be acted upon by this character.

So we should discount what Fauci has to say about this. The only interest in his pronouncements will be watching how he smoothly inches his way over to the most politic position of the moment for him. If and when the U.S. establishment consensus is that yes indeed, the virus was a lab leak, he'll be telling us that he never ruled that out as a possibility (which will be a lie). He's an expert at parsing words so he never admits error or is caught in a blame-worthy position.  He is first and foremost a government bureaucrat, all of whose public pronouncements are designed to manipulate the public, to cause a political or social effect. [5]

But Fauci's newfound openness to at least investigating the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan has inadvertently provided more confirmation that that's exactly what happened. Chinese state media are now calling Fauci "morally degenerate." (No gratitude for the year Fauci spent deflecting suspicion away from them!) 

If the lab was blameless, the Chinese would WELCOME an investigation to exonerate the lab and themselves! Instead they go ballistic at the mere suggestion of looking into the matter.. You know what that proves?

Guilty as charged.

A year ago, Fauci got the usual glorifying treatment in this National Geographic puff piece from May 4, 2020. Notice the straw man argument headline: "No scientific evidence the coronavirus was MADE in a Chinese lab." The issue isn't whether it was man-made. The issue is a leak of the virus into the environment. "Proving" the virus was not artificially engineered was speciously used to assert the disease outbreak did not come from the lab. Which of course is sophistry. What research labs study is organisms from nature.

Fauci Knows Best! Just Put Your Faith In Him.

  

1]  "Strong Evidence The Novel Coronavirus Originated In A Chinese Lab. Here's The Evidence," April 12, 2021.

2] These lab leaks occurred starting in 2004. It was the coronavirus species that caused SARS. The coronavirus causing COVID-19 is the third coronavirus that has caused an outbreak of human disease. In 2002 a coronavirus caused the disease SARS. In 2011 another such virus caused MERS. Many times more cases of illness, and of death, have been caused by COVID-19 than by either of those two earlier coronavirus-caused diseases.

3]  "How It Started, How It's Going," On The Media, May 21, 2021, a program of WNYC radio in New York City aired nationally by NPR, the U.S.-government-created and partially funded radio network.

4]  Actually I am constantly monitored by the secret police. But the units of the massive U.S. police state assigned to torment domestic dissidents are the most secretive and highly compartmentalized part of the repressive apparatus. So it is unlikely they would communicate with those assigned to the task of investigating the Wuhan outbreak. Plus their hatred of me would disincline them from seeing any value in my insights.

5]  On May 27 Saint Anthony was awarded with a "Webbie," one of those self-aggrandizing "honors" that the professional mass manipulation establishment hands out to its members. Career corporate propagandist Katie Courie presented the "award." Fauci spoke thus at the ceremony: "Always speak truth to power." Thus the spectacle of a career government bureaucrat osing as a brave dissident! Hey asshole, if you meant it, you'd call on Biden to stop persecuting Julian Assange and issuea presidential pardon to protect him! What an obnoxious phony!

Trump Opens Door to Revived Iranian Nuclear Program, Europe Confirms It's America's Bitch, and Israel and Saudi Arabia are Kvelling

Kvelling is Yiddish. It means "to be extraordinarily pleased; especially, to be bursting with pride." Certainly the Israelis and Saudis have reason to be. Both nations are eager for the U.S. to go to war with Iran, and have been pushing the U.S. in that direction for years.

Trump finally carried out his threat to kill the hard-won nuclear agreement with Iran. Two years of negotiations by the U.S., France, Germany, Britain, China, and Russia, all arrayed against Iran, with U.S.-imposed sanctions choking the Iranian economy, produced the best deal that could be squeezed from the theocrats ruling that nation. Iran surrendered ALL its enriched uranium, agreed to permanently shut down a reactor capable of producing plutonium, mothballed its centrifuges, and accepted extremely stringent oversight by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency).  All this to last for 15 years.

If Trump wanted a better deal, he had plenty of time to negotiate one. But he has demagogically insisted for several years that the agreement was the "worst deal ever." A preposterous assertion.

The European "partners" (in reality, they're nothing more than junior lackeys to U.S. Imperialism) pleaded with and cajoled Trump to try to make him see reason, to no avail. French President Emmanuel Macron came all the way to Washington and endured demeaning treatment by Trump (Trump ostentatiously pretending to pick something off Macron's suit in front of the world press and announcing it was "dandruff," forcing Macron to submit to the insult) for absolutely nothing. Britain dispatched their foreign minister, the buffoon Boris Johnson, to Washington to pointlessly lobby various Trump regime apparatchiks on the matter.

Macron addressed the U.S. Congress, delivering a relatively honest speech which no doubt annoyed most of that body.

The Europeans are already caving in, reaffirming their status as the U.S.' bitch. This proves that the European Union is a bust. It was supposed to allow Europe to swing its proper weight. Instead it is a bad joke. The European bourgeoisie just cannot or will not free themselves from their position of slavish subordination to the U.S.

Trump has made clear that, as usual, foreign corporations must abide by U.S. "law" and conform to U.S. foreign policy. Just a day after Trump wrecked the agreement with Iran, which the U.S. got Russia, China, Germany, Britain, France, and the EU to sign on to against Iran, his Ambassador to Germany is already ordering German companies to shut down their Iranian business operations "immediately." Well, when you're the Boss of the World, you can issue such orders.

Unless companies want to quit the U.S. market, which is many times the size of the Iranian one, AND subject themselves to ruinous U.S. "fines," AND risk criminal indictments of the company and its executives, effectively confining those executives to their home countries or risk arrest and extradition to the U.S. to "face American justice" (decades in prison) for refusing to be agents of U.S. Imperialist foreign policy, these non-U.S. businesses have to knuckle under to U.S. diktat.

Some U.S. media "commentators" are fatuously saying canceling the agreement of the U.S. government was Trump "making good on a campaign pledge." As if Trump feels an obligation to keep his word on anything. And he made numerous pledges to snooker people into voting for him- all the good ones he has reneged on, only keeping the venal ones. (As I expected.)

Here are some choice excerpts that the bombastic  blustering bullyboy Trump spewed in making his announcement on May 8th:

Trump- "this deal is catastrophic for America, for Israel, and for the whole Middle East."

He sneered at "the decaying and rotten structure of the current deal." (Reminds me of Adolf Hitler "freeing" Germany from the "shackles" of the rotten Versailles Treaty.)

Trump says the new deal he pretends he'll force on Iran "will benefit all of Iran and the Iranian people." (I'm sure he cares so much about the Iranian people! This is a guy who's trying to ban all Muslims from the U.S.) He wants to throw in "terrorism" and Iranian "meddling" in Syria and Yemen as part of new demands on Iran.

Trump threatens "any nation" that aids "Iran in its [non-existent] quest for a nuclear weapon" will also get slammed with U.S. sanctions.

Of course, Iran wasn't developing nuclear weapons, it was developing the capability to develop such weapons. And right now, iran isn't even doing THAT!

But the lying jackass demagogue who is president of the U.S. Empire could care less about facts, as he has shown throughout his entire adult life. Nor did the U.S. media bother informing the millions who are forced to rely on it for information that what Trump said was false. For all their bleatings about his "lies," they reinforce some of his lies.

Iran now has to decide whether to accept being completely ripped off, having surrendered its nuclear program (mainly consisting of uranium enrichment) for nothing, or restart it. Trump is making gangster threats implying violence. Many imperialists in the U.S. and Israel, and the evil, medieval rulers of Saudi Arabia, have long been urging the U.S. to bomb Iran. (Dying U.S. Senator John McCain would love to see that.)

Iran's major commodity is, of course, oil. And since oil is traded on the international market in U.S. dollars, and the U.S. Treasury Department controls dollar transactions, that makes it extremely difficult for Iran to sell its oil without U.S. permission. So the U.S. has Iran over a barrel, so to speak. (One of Saddam Hussein's fatal mistakes was floating the idea of using a medium of exchange other than the U.S. dollar for oil transactions. The U.S. tends to react violently to impingements on its power.)

The Israelis and Saudis are eager for the U.S. to wage war on Iran, especially a bombing campaign. Terrorism ("covert action") would also be part of the war. The U.S. under Obama infiltrated Special Forces teams into Iran to plant surveillance devices, including radiation monitors disguised as bricks in walls, and spy gadgets to monitor truck traffic disguised as rocks. The Israelis of course were busily assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, creating terror to discourage Iranian scientists from participating in nuclear research. And Obama infiltrated the Stuxnet malware into Iran's nuclear program computer system, destroying centrifuges.

Understand that it is official U.S. policy to overthrow the Iranian government. (This would be the second time they did that, the first being in 1953, which destroyed Iranian democracy.)  The U.S. is still bitter that the client dictator it installed in 1953, the Shah, was overthrown in 1979. And while the quarter million Iranians who died under the brutal reign of the Shah are never, ever mentioned in U.S. media, they still reference the so-called "hostage crisis," when the apparatchiks in the U.S. embassy in Tehran were  seized and held for 444 days, and the U.S. media engaged in a daily drumbeat of hysterical propaganda about it. ABC "News" even started an entire evening program devoted to the "crisis," which became "Nightline," hosted by Kissinger maven Ted Koppel. What's never said, what has been consigned to the memory hole, is why Iran seized the U.S. apparatchiks. Obviously a key part of the story. But not in the U.S. propaganda version of it.

Iran warned the Jimmy Carter regime not to give sanctuary to the fleeing. Shah. Then Henry Kissinger called the president of the U.S. and transmitted an order from David Rockefeller, a man at the apex of the U.S. ruling class, that Carter must allow the Shah in. Carter protested that there would be bad consequences, but obeyed his master. (Carter was chosen to be president in 1976 by the Rockefeller-created Trilateral Commission, which assigned Zbigniew Brzezinski as Carter's "national security advisor." Brzezinski went on the engineer the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, something he has boasted about. Time magazine, an organ run by Trilateral Commission members, presented Carter to the American public as the second coming of JFK.)

Well, the "hostage-taking" duly followed the Shah's entry into the U.S., the resulting media-generated "crisis" ultimately cost Carter re-election. And the racist neo-fascist Ronald Reagan, running against Carter in the 1980 election, made a sub rosa deal with the Khomeini regime to only free the U.S. personnel minutes after Carter was no longer president.

Now back to the present. What of the non-U.S. lackey nations that are a party to the nuclear agreement with Iran, China and Russia? They too operate under the oppressive umbrella of the U.S.-controlled global financial system. [1]

And the U.S. has a veritable galaxy of laws, rules, and regulations that give it infinite power over the financial transactions of others. No bank that wishes to do transactions outside its home country's boundaries can defy the U.S. People and companies that have never set foot in the U.S. or done any action inside the U.S. are routinely indicted by the U.S. and either extradited or kidnapped to "face justice" inside the U.S. and ultimately be subjected to often draconian sentences imprisoned in the vast U.S. gulag. (The U.S., with about 4.7% of the world's population, holds 25% of the entire planet's prisoners. The U.S. imprisoners a higher percentage of its adult population- close to 1%- than any nation on earth. China, a country with four times the population of the U.S., has slightly fewer prisoners.)

The U.S. considers its laws binding on everyone on earth- and indeed enforces them. The railroading of the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was set up in Thailand by U.S. DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents pretending to be arms buyers for  the Colombian rebel group FARC, and who now sits in a U.S. prison, is one of many examples. (What the hell is an alleged drug agency doing setting up fake arms deals to entrap foreign citizens? Good questions.) Britain has shipped hapless citizens to the U.S. to face bogus charges, to the outrage of its own media and public.

So what does Europe do when its arms are twisted by the U.S.? It says "Uncle!" Europe is paying the economic price for U.S.-imposed sanctions on Russia to punish Russia for "meddling" in Ukraine. The U.S. has fined Europe's banks billions of dollars in a shakedown racket for violating sanctions on countries the U.S. doesn't like. (Other nation's banks have been hit too. See chart.)

But the cowardly bourgeois rulers of Europe are good at one thing: punching down. They sure know how to oppress their own people, as the corrupt Spanish government of the Francoist Mariano Rajoy is doing in Catalonia, or as the remorseless British Prime Minister Theresa May is doing, deporting tens of thousands of Commonwealth citizens who came to Britain legally decades ago and are now being reclassified as "illegal" because the British government failed to issue them documents when they arrived. Theresa May, the architect of the Grenfell Towers Fire massacre who slashed funding for fire and police protection starting in her previous job as Interior Secretary. (A job in which she began the targeting of immigrants.)

Anyway, sit back and enjoy the coming war between Iran and the U.S./Israel/Saudi Arabia. Iran is not completely alone. It is fighting side by side with Russia in Syria to prop up the murderous Assad regime. It also has the loyal support of Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and militia. (The Israelis have been busily bombing Iranian weapons shipments in Syria they claim are destined for Hezbollah.) Every time Iran counterattacks, except the propagandists and governments of the U.S. side to shriek "IRANIAN TERRORISM!"

Israel has wasted no time lighting the fuse. Today they bombed fifty Iranian targets inside Syria, using as justification an alleged Iranian missile fired into the Golan Heights (former Syrian territory that Israel conquered in the 1967 war). No mention in U.S. (and other "Western") media that this follows months of Israeli bombing raids on Iranian targets inside Syria, with no response from Iran at all until now, with the alleged missile. (Or 20 missiles, as CBS later asserted. CBS is virtually a propaganda arm of the Israeli government in the U.S.) Israel threatened more to come if the Iranians don't take it lying down. Russia has expressed alarm over the Israeli pummeling.

This war, if it comes, will go on for years. Like some other wars the U.S. started in the region, eh?


1]  The U.S. isn't even satisfied with controlling the world's financial system. It even has to spy on everybody and hack into bank computers. Even SWIFT, the system for international bank transactions, was hacked by the NSA. (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication- SWIFT. SWIFT has cut off Iran's banks from the rest of the world, on U.S. orders.)

Bully Boy Trump Meets His Match in Kim Jong-un

The U.S. habitually forces other nations to bend to its will by using diplomatic arm-twisting, economic warfare or brute military force. The U.S. has been using all three against North Korea since the Korean War, and since the regime of Clinton and running through Bush the Younger, Obama, and now Trump The Narcissist, the U.S. has been trying to reverse North Korea's nuclear weapons development, presumably with the addition of cyberwarfare in the arsenal of U.S. weaponry. [1]

But North Korea is proving a tough nut for the U.S. to crack.

The country has great internal cohesion, unlike easy targets of U.S. coups like Chile in 1973, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, or Ukraine in 2014, among other examples. Nor can the U.S. simply invade, as it did the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 19 83, Panama in 1989, Haiti and Nicaragua in the early 20th century, Cuba and the Philippines circa 1898 and so on.

The internal cohesion of NK is based on the extreme totalitarianism of the regime, and the effective brainwashing of the populace, backed by coercion. (Actually most nations rely on brainwashing through propaganda and indoctrination in the school system backed by coercion. That description certainly fits the U.S.) The impracticality of invasion stems from the fact that NK has nuclear weapons, and a conventional military that in any event would inflict significant casualties on a U.S. invasion force- something U.S. ruling elites are deathly afraid of, for good reasons.

Donald Trump, a lifelong bully, apparently thinks he can intimidate the North Koreans. That is amazingly obtuse. It is perfectly obvious that the North Koreans are extremely tough and very hard. Trump has been issuing verbal threats for several weeks, vowing to "take care of the problem" of North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs. His Secretary of State, Rex "Mr. ExxonMobil" Tillerson, has echoed the threats, saying that "all options are on the table," U.S.-gangsterspeak for You Better Be Afraid We Will Attack You With Our Military.

Currently Trump is rushing a carrier battle group at North Korea. NK's response has been a threat to launch a preemptive nuclear attack. In other words, if they think the U.S. is going to attack them, they will launch.

Whether or not that's a bluff, it is highly reckless of the Trump regime to test it.

A better tact would be to accept the reality that war with North Korea is simply insane, and negotiate. For one thing, there is no practical way to stop the North from destroying South Korea's capital and economic heart, Seoul, in a matter of hours with the 10,000 artillery pieces embedded in a mountain just over the border. Except maybe by hydrogen bombing the mountain, which would release vast quantites of radioactive fallout over South Korea and Japan and China and ineed the whole region (as well as float over the entire globe, including the U.S.). And of course the U.S. would simultaneously have to "take out" the North's nuclear arsenal- except that the U.S. does not know where all of it is hidden.

China has been advocating negotiations. True, previous negotiations "failed." That is, they produced temporary (or no) results. The first deal, cut by Clinton, might have worked if the U.S. hadn't double-crossed the North on a promise to build civilian nuclear power plants. (The U.S. said, Oh, Japan is supposed to build those. Japan never did, so the North surreptitiously began nuclear weapons work again.) But it did halt the North's development of nuclear weaponry for a few years. And yes, NK basically has practiced a policy of diplomatic extortion, using its nuclear arsenal as threat. Realistically one shouldn't expect the North to ever give up that arsenal, as without it it has no leverage. At best, perhaps a halt to its further development could be negotiated.

To be sure, the dynastic Kim regime is fanatical and unreasonable, but not wholly irrational. One good starting point for negotiations would be to propose a formal end to the Korean War by treaty. (There is actually just a truce in place.) However, the U.S. hates compromising with an adversary, especially one perceived as weak. This is why the U.S. prolonged the Vietnam War for so long, seeking "victory" (by pummelling the Vietnamese into submission). (Lyndon Johnson contemptuously likened North Vietnam to "a dwarf with a penknife" threatening the U.S.! There's the mentality you're dealing with.)

North Korea feels genuinely threatened by the U.S. Increasing that threat only increases the North's belligerence and determination to create a nuclear deterrent that can destroy not only U.S. bases in the Far East, but attack the continental U.S. The only strategy that has a chance to stop the development of North Korean ICBMs is negotiation and compromise, as distasteful as that is.

Nor should Trump count on China to bail out the U.S. China has expressed its strong objection to the THAAD anti-missile system the U.S. is preparing to deploy in South Korea, seeing it as neutralizing China's own missiles. Nor do they want to undermine the North Korea regime or bring it to its knees. It fears in that event that the South would take over the North, bring a U.S. client up to China's doorstep, and/or creating a flood of North Korean refugees into China (on top of the flow that already exists). (China has cancelled North Korean coal exports to China for this year, to express displeasure with North Korean missile tests. Oddly, it has been reported that bilateral trade has increased despite this. A real blow would be if China cut off oil shipments to the North. That would surely cripple the North's military. There is no indication China intends to go that far.)

But between a U.S. president who is ignorant, bombastic, blustering, narcissistic, and accustomed to getting his way through intimidation and bullying, and a U.S. military that is ascendant in the foreign policy arena (Trump has put generals in charge of the Pentagon and National Security Council, and diminished the role of the State Department, even proposing to cut its budget by 28%), it is hard to be optimistic about an intelligent strategy being adopted as U.S. policy. Not that the military necessarily wants war, but that after all is all they know how to do.

1] Overtly and covertly, the U.S. has used military and terroristic violence thousands of times in its history. Examples of economic warfare include against Cuba starting in 1959; against Chile from 1970 to 1973, when Nixon gave CIA secret police chief Richard Helms orders to "make the economy scream" to destabilize that country and overthrow elected socialist president Salvador Allende; against Iran since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979; 

Why the hell is this man laughing?

Trump Regime Bumping Up Against The Limits of Bluster In Latest North Korean Missile Test

North Korea just launched its second missile test of recent days, on the eve of the visit of Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping to tough-talking narcissist Donald J. Trump, president of the U.S. on account of the defective U.S. electoral system in which a guy who LOST by 2.9 million votes to his Democratic rival, "won." Trump lured Xi to his lair in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, a tacky palace of ostentatious bad taste.

Trump said just before that if China didn't rein in North Korea, the U.S. would take care of it. How, as with every Trump claim of action, he didn't say.

After the previous North Korean missile test, Trump's Secretary of State, the former boss of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, threatened that "all options are on the table," which in U.S.-Imperialist-speak, is a threat of military attack.

Well, the pathological cult regime of NK just launched a second missile test on the even of Xi's visit (timing not accidental), and this time the riposte of the U.S. State Department, representing The Most Powerful Nation On Earth, was quite a bit more subdued, to wit:

"The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment."

Somehow that's not as scary as the last comment.

Ironically, the Trumpoids condemn the Obama regime for weakness in letting the murderous Bashir Assad, destroyer of Syria, call his bluff on the use of chemical weapons. Here is North Korea calling the bluff of tough-talking Trump and Tillerson.

Good luck, guys.

China Snatches U.S. Navy Spy Apparatus; U.S. Demands Its Return

An underwater, unmanned "drone" operated by the U.S. Navy was seized by the Chinese Navy. China claims it was in Chinese waters, the U.S. claims it was in international waters. [It was in the South China Sea, which China now claims as a virtual Chinese lake. Hence the disagreement.] The U.S. has demanded that China give its drone back, and China said okay, it'll give it back- (when it's good and ready, no doubt). (A curve ball was thrown into the play by president-to-be Donald Trump, who said China should keep the drone. Don't ask me why. I suppose he just always has to grab the spotlight, and that often requires saying something outlandish, in order to stand out. He is a narcissist, an exhibitionist, and an egomaniac, remember. In fact, I'm sure he won't let you forget that for the coming four years, at least.)

The U.S. government domestic radio propaganda network, NPR, absurdly claimed that this spy device was engaged in "scientific" research- as if the U.S. Navy is a scientific research organization.

The Pentagon propaganda office issued a statement under the name of its chief mouthpiece Peter Cook asserting that the underwater spy vehicle was gathering "military oceanographic data...." [My emphasis.] I guess the propagandists at the Pentagon and at NPR didn't get their stories straight. But NPR regards it as one of its missions to always protect the U.S. government, so that could account for the misrepresentation of the drone's mission.  [1]
 
China will doubtless disassemble and study and copy their booty. They did this sort of thing before, when a U.S. spy plane was forced to land on Chinese territory after a Chinese fighter jet clipped and damaged it in flight. (The hot-dogging Chinese pilot was killed in his reckless act, which infuriated the Chinese towards the U.S. But since the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, after the CIA gave its location to NATO, supposedly in ignorance that it was the Chinese embassy, the Chinese are I think predisposed to blame the U.S. for their losses in confrontations with the U.S. By the way, that embassy bombing is NEVER mentioned in the U.S. Amnesia handicaps ones ability to deal realistically with the world and its other inhabitants.)

This incident is another small step in China's nibbling away at the edge of U.S. power in the Pacific. A much bigger milestone is Philippines death squad president Rodrigo Duterte telling the U.S. to kiss-off, and openly embracing China. The Obama regime has responded like a deer in the headlights, seemingly frozen. When Duterte called Obama a "son of a whore" and publicly cursed him, the U.S. barely reacted to this effrontery. Then the Philippines won a court case against China for China appropriating islands in the South China Sea. The U.S. reacted to that by talking like a mediator, instead of clearly siding with the winner, the Philippines. This signaled weakness. Obviously the U.S. wishes to avoid confrontation with China- but that means the U.S. must retreat in the face of growing Chinese power and "assertiveness."

The Philippines then abandoned its claim and started cozying up to China, under Duterte.

Duterte brags of personally murdering "criminals." No doubt the mild verbal remonstrances the U.S. has to make over his "human rights record," in order to maintain its image as the beacon of freedom and democracy and human rights, irked Duterte, even though the criticisms were strictly pro forma. Duterte is a crude thug, unsophisticated to play the game with winks and nods and understand that some things are just political theater, not to be taken seriously. (The U.S. "objecting" to relentless Israeli colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is a long-running, very tired political play.) A murderous goon like Duterte is temperamentally more comfortable with the tyrants of Beijing than with the two-stepping hypocrites of Washington.

A bit of background: The Philippines was a U.S. colony until after World War II, when it became a neocolony and client dictatorship. It was a Spanish colony until the U.S. seized it as war booty during the Spanish-American war of 1898, when the U.S. also gained control of Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and carved Panama out of Colombia for its own uses. The Filipinos had the crazy idea that they should be independent, so several hundred thousand of them had to be killed to convince them to stop resisting U.S. conquest. President Theodore Roosevelt, an iconic figure in U.S. pseudo-history (quasi-mythology) sent hearty congratulations to the U.S. military commander of the invasion and occupation force for his fine work in suppressing Filipino resistance.

During World War II, the Japanese occupied the Philippines. Their brutality alienated the Filipinos, just as Japanese barbarism alienated the other victims in their "Co-Prosperity Sphere," such as the Koreans and Chinese. In this, they made exactly the same strategic blunder as the Nazis. Their ideology of racial "superiority," hyper-militarism and fascism proved too much for the colonized to bear, unlike other imperialisms which are tolerated by the conquered for longer time-spans.

Two giant U.S. military bases, the Subic Bay naval base and Clark airfield, were long occupied by the U.S. Some years after U.S.-backed dictator Marcos was overthrown, the U.S. was asked to vacate those bases. The U.S. has been angling to get those or other bases in the Philippines back ever since.

For a number of years now, U.S. "special forces" have been semi-covertly helping the Filipino military hunt and kill Islamofascist rebels in the Philippines. Duterte now says he wants the U.S. military out, and the U.S. can keep its money too.

 

                       EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT! DUTERTE DUMPS DIRT ON U.S.!


Instead of the U.S. successfully constructing a coalition of nations to contain China, things seem to be going the other way, first with the U.S. gratuitously picking a fight with Russia over the Ukraine, which the U.S. gleefully destabilized, and driving Russia into China's arms (witness a recent multi-billion dollar economic deal and joint naval maneuvers between Russia and China), friendlier ties between India and China, and now the Philippines rushing to embrace China and spurning its long-time dominant political spouse the U.S.

The U.S. is so powerful that it has gotten away with some major blunders (the Indochina War, siding with jihadists against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and fecklessly allowing Pakistan to become a nuclear weapons power, for example), but with China's rise, the stakes may be higher than ever. In the two World Wars, other nations did the heavy fighting and dying, and the U.S. picked up the chips at the end of the games. But all-out war with nuclear-armed China is out of the question, as obviously a land invasion is!

China is ruled by a patient one-party dictatorship that has less pressure from domestic public opinion when it comes to how it conducts foreign affairs than in the U.S. case. It also has a much more unified ruling class, whereas in the U.S. the Republican Party seems determined to destroy the Democratic Party and monopolize political power. No matter what a Democratic president does, even if it is identical with Republican policies, he is attacked by the Republicans. That won't be a problem for the next four to eight years, with a Republican president and Congress, and the Democrats inclined to bark but never bite. But U.S. politicians are still remarkably short-sighted, and this is reflected in its conduct of foreign affairs. Part of this is due to their need to get reelected (every two years in the case of House Representatives). Part is due to Americans' temperamental impatience. And part is a disinterest in history, which to Americans is like intellectual broccoli, something off-putting.

But ironically, it may be the mercurial, notoriously short-attention-spanned Donald Trump who makes some changes. [2]

1]  Here is the Pentagon's statement. The title links to globalsecurity.org, which reproduced the Pentagon statement. If you want to have the Pentagon record you computer ID so they can track you, put you in the NSA database, and maybe plant spyware/malware on your computer, I have also provided the Pentagon's URL for the statement, from global security, below the statement. Note that the type of data the Pentagon admits the drone was collecting is pertinent to anti-sub warfare, especially "sound speed." To destroy subs, one has to track them by listening for them. Sound travels through water at different speeds depending on salinity and temperature, for example. So this drone is not so innocent, to quote a song.

"Statement by Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook on Incident in South China Sea, Release No. NR-448-16," December 16, 2016.

Using appropriate government-to-government channels, the Department of Defense has called upon China to immediately return an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) that China unlawfully seized on Dec. 15 in the South China Sea while it was being recovered by a U.S. Navy oceanographic survey ship. The USNS Bowditch (T-AGS 62) and the UUV -- an unclassified "ocean glider" system used around the world to gather military oceanographic data such as salinity, water temperature, and sound speed - were conducting routine [sic!]operations in accordance with international law about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay, Philippines, when a Chinese Navy PRC DALANG III-Class ship (ASR-510) launched a small boat and retrieved the UUV. Bowditch made contact with the PRC Navy ship via bridge-to-bridge radio to request the return of the UUV. The radio contact was acknowledged by the PRC Navy ship, but the request was ignored. The UUV is a sovereign immune vessel of the United States. We call upon China to return our UUV immediately, and to comply with all of its obligations under international law.

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1032611/

2] See "Is Trump An Unwitting International Relations 'Realist'?," December 16, 2016.

Is Trump An Unwitting International Relations "Realist"?

"International relations" is an academic field, a subset of "political science," that deals with the relations of nation-states to each other and the system in which they operate. There are various schools of thought within international relations in U.S. academe. One is the "realist" school. Perhaps its leading public exponent today is University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer, a military veteran and self-described "conservative" who was a protege and admirer of Samuel "Mad Dog" Huntington, late of Harvard University. [1]

Two things Trump has been up to create an interesting parallel to a strategic policy advocated by Mearsheimer. They involve Russia, and China.

 Mearsheimer sees China as the only potential competitor and threat to the U.S., a rising power with a population over four times the size of the U.S.' and a rapidly growing economy. China has been flexing its muscles in the South China sea and aggressively claiming ownership over the area. Russia on the other hand is a declining power, in this view. Mearsheimer sees the natural outcome of the U.S.-China power rivalry as a containment strategy, especially if war is to be avoided. He sees the U.S. as the linchpin of a coalition including Russia, Japan, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and others that will surround and contain China. We're already seeing friction between the U.S. and China in the region, and military feints and muscle-flexing by both nations.

President-to-be Donald Trump has been accused for months by the U.S. media, by Democratic operatives, and prior to the November 8th U.S. election by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, of being cozy with Russia and admiring of Russian president Vladimir Putin. This hectoring has continued post-election, by much of the U.S. media, and by Democratic Party poohbahs, accusing Trump of allegedly being "pro-Russia," "friendly" with Putin, even being a Putin stooge.

There is indeed evidence that Trump isn't interested in pursuing the anti-Russian policy of the Obama regime, a policy supported by the elitists of the so-called foreign policy establishment, a claque of unelected people who rotate between cushy seats in government, academia, and various foundations and institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations, the latter functioning like a mother-in-law engaging in backseat driving to presidents and to the State Department.  These people keep accusing Trump of "praising" Putin, apparently because Trump called Putin a "strong leader." (These same carpers consistently brand Putin an "autocrat." So he's a weak autocrat? That's an oxymoron. Of COURSE Putin is "strong," if we accept the U.S. establishment's own insistence that he's an autocrat! That's just a fact. As a matter of logic- and admittedly logic isn't the U.S. blatherariat's strong suit- it's not necessarily a compliment. If I say "Hitler was a strong leader," I can assure you I don't intend it as praise. But let's posit that Trump admires Putin- I think he at least respects him.)

There's also much chatter about Trump's "business ties" to Russia. Evidence of Trump's "business ties" with Russia seem to amount to a lot of Big Talk about deals that never materialized. Trump does a lot of fishing until he finds a sucker to hook.

Stronger evidence of an impending "pro-Russia" tilt comes from Trump's announcement of his pick for Secretary of State: the boss of oil company giant ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson. (Rex by the way comes from Latin, and is defined in English as reigning king.) According to The New Yorker magazine website, Tillerson "has forged close ties with Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s state oil company." [2] Putin even awarded Tillerson a medal in 2013, the "Order of Friendship." ExxonMobil has a multibillion dollar deal with the Russian oil firm Rosneft to develop Russian oil fields. This relationship had the necessary blessing of Russian president (excuse me, "autocrat") Putin. (See my previous post for a partially-facetious photo essay on the Tillerson-Putin connection.) U.S. sanctions against Russia (punishment for Russian resistance to the U.S. takeover of Ukraine) have put the Rosneft deal in the deep freeze. ExxonMobil shareholders can look forward to the deal to be thawed out under the Trump regime.

We should expect that Tillerson will safeguard the interests of the company that is his sole adult employer and to which he owes his wealth, contrary to fatuous assertions in the U.S. media that OF COURSE Tillerson will put the U.S. "national interest" (whatever THAT is) first- and it's not just Trump partisans making that ridiculous claim. (I guess these people didn't notice how Hillary Clinton sold favors from her position as Secretary of State to donors to the Clinton Foundation, including a huge uranium mining deal. These propagandist shills will say anything, no matter how patently absurd, to shore up the perceived "legitimacy" of the corrupt U.S. power system.) Money talks, and billions of dollars is a very forceful voice.

Finally there's the ongoing campaign to blame Russia for Trump's victory with the evidence-free claim, now treated as fact, that Putin ordered computer hacking into Democratic computers and delivery of the resulting email caches to WikiLeaks to help Trump. Obama is now threatening retaliation. That needs to be the subject of another essay. Briefly, this ignores the fact that the archaic Electoral College allowed Trump to "win" with fewer votes than Clinton, and that the worst damage to Clinton occurred shortly before election day, when Republican FBI secret police chief James Comey revivified the Clinton private server "scandal" by announcing new evidence in the closed investigation in the form of more emails found on devices seized from disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the man the media never tires of publicly humiliating for texting pictures of his penis to various women. Comey caused Clinton's lead to plunge from 14% ahead nationally to even with Trump. So the Democrats are scapegoating Putin! Similarly, after the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) stole the 2000 election, with five GOP agents sitting on the Supreme Court delivering the coup de grace, the Democrats ever since have blamed Ralph Nader. In that election too, the Democrat, Albert Gore, won millions more votes than George W. Bush. (Clinton actually won the nation by 2.5 million votes. Some "democracy." Just imagine if it happened in Russia, what the U.S. media would be saying!)

If it can be anticipated that Trump will pursue a friendlier policy towards Russia, on the China side of the ledger, Trump added minuses, committing what the U.S. establishment considered a gross diplomatic faux pas, namely accepting a congratulatory phone call after his election "win" from the president of Taiwan. This irked the Chinese rulers, who issued a public growl. U.S. establishment elite types added their own disapproving tongue-clucks over Trump's annoying the Chinese tyrants by seeming to call into question the "one China" policy of the U.S. by accepting the phone call. The "one China" policy means the U.S. recognizes China's claim to Taiwan as a mere province of China, not an independent nation as most Taiwanese prefer.

Trump, a habitual counter-puncher, upped the ante, saying in effect So What? The U.S. "doesn't have to be bound" by the old policy. To this China responded with a veiled threat of war, saying if Trump failed to hew to the one China line, it could "threaten peace." [The current U.S. policy is a schizophrenic one of recognizing China's claim to Taiwan as a mere Chinese province, refusing diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which it helped kick out of the UN to appease China, yet on the other hand maintaining a posture of preparing to use military force to protect Taiwan from China! If Taiwan is nothing but a Chinese province, like Florida is a U.S. state, by what right does the U.S. threaten to wage war to "defend" it from the country it is ostensibly a part of? For me, I favor self-determination, and loath repressive dictatorships, so I think Taiwan should be recognized as an independent nation. That is the human perspective on the matter.]

U.S. foreign policy and media elites wasted no time pounding on Trump to try and force him into line on the "established" -that is, preexisting- U.S. policy. An example popped up today even as I write, on the U.S. Government radio propaganda network NPR, on the program "Here and Now," (Dec 12). [NOTE: I ended up not finishing this essay until later.] The program's "security expert," an Imperialist named Jim Walsh, who heads the "Security Studies" program at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, broke it down for us. Walsh tsk-tsked that Trump wasn't getting the proper "security" briefings- i.e. being indoctrinated by people like Walsh. Opining disapprovingly on Trump announcing he's not bound by the "one China" policy," Walsh said, "it's been settled policy since Nixon;" a U.S. policy "for 30 years;" Taiwan is "a vital interest to China;" "normally it's a bad idea to threaten a nuclear weapons state;"  dropping the policy "could be a dangerous thing;" and "we should be trying to cooperate " with China on things like North Korea. Other NPR programs today similarly piled on Trump. [3] 

Jim The Security Expert would no doubt disagree, but almost all of that applies to how the U.S. has been treating RUSSIA over Ukraine. I say he would probably disagree because there is virtual unanimity in the U.S. establishment that Russia "caused" the Ukraine "crisis." But take each point: Ukraine is a vital strategic interest to Russia- it's on its border, and it has an absolutely vital naval base in the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine. Russia is a nuclear power. And the U.S. needs Russia's cooperation in Syria, among other places, and needed it to conclude a nuclear enrichment deal with Iran stopping Iran's program. But on one point there's a difference. The U.S. has  been consistent in its policy towards Russia. It has extended its policy of unremitting hostility to the U.S.S.R. to Russia. Too consistent, in fact. Sometimes Change Is Good. But the American bourgeoisie only think so when it's something BAD they're cramming down our throats, like job insecurity, "globalization," loss of company pensions, and soon the gutting of Social Security and Medicare, if they can. Or if there's some government they're peeved at and decide to overthrow. Suddenly "stability" doesn't matter and change is the thing.

Add it all up, and you get a friendly rather than hostile attitude towards Russia and a hardened stance against China, in line with the "realist" prescription of Mearsheimer.

Trump of course is too unschooled and ignorant to be consciously subscribing to the Mearsheimer strategy. He's probably never even heard of John J. Mearsheimer, or the Realist school of international relations theory. But his actions and attitudes have been accidentally dove-tailing with the strategy Mearsheimer advocates, at least so far. Ironically, Mearsheimer considered Trump unqualified to be president, but has deemed Obama "basically a realist" in the technical academic sense that Mearsheimer categorizes himself. This despite the fact that Obama has created hostile relations with Russia (by aggressively ripping Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence, violently overthrowing the democratically-elected government there using fascist mobs who set policemen on fire- you can view youtube.com videos of this- and sending in false flag snipers to shoot both police and protesters- and for good measure we had Victoria Nuland not just handing out cookies to "protesters" but publicly bragging about the billions spent by the U.S. to achieve its aim, namely subversion of an elected government, which the U.S. euphemizes as "democracy promotion," an Orwellian inversion of dictionary definitions of words- in a country that had a scheduled election coming up in months, where the president to be overthrown offered major concessions to the mob, which at U.S. direction it rejected) with Obama thus driving Russia into the arms of China. The entire Western establishment has dutifully followed along in this moronic and capricious strategy.

China and Russia already have had joint naval maneuvers and signed major economic deals as a result of the irrational policy towards Russia of the U.S., a policy driven by the hyper-aggressive imperialism of the U.S. The U.S. is a nation that won't be satisfied until it controls the entire planet, at which point it will move on to controlling other planets in the solar system. (Actually that's not even facetious. The U.S. military is already plotting to control the immediate space above the earth.)

Of course the U.S. will never achieve true world domination. It cannot dominate China, for one. For another, the world is too fractious to effectively rule, as the quasi-anarchic situation in the Middle East as well as in Somalia, Mali, and other places, demonstrates.)

The truth is, as boorish, ignorant, and improvisational as he is, Trump may accidentally end up following a far wiser foreign policy towards China and Russia than the "experts" have been prescribing! Who'd a thunk it! [4]

1]  "Mad Dog" isn't my sobriquet for Huntington. It was bestowed by his fellow imperialists during the Vietnam War, during which he offered his expertise in helping destroy Vietnam.

2] "Rex Tillerson, from a Corporate Oil Sovereign to the State Department," The New Yorker, December 11, 2016.

3] Another example from NPR,; John Hockenberry brought on to his radio show "The Takeaway"  a creep from the infamous secret police corporation Stratfor, an outfit run by veteran secret policemen that works to attack and delegitimize American dissidents, often using illegal means. The Stratfor ghoul pushed the line of the day, that Russian "hacking" of the U.S. election helped Trump win, which supposedly demonstrates a Trump-Putin Axis. (In the extreme version, Trump is a Putin puppet.) Trump of course actually lost- by which I mean he got fewer votes than Clinton. But the U.S. isn't a normal nation. Here, the loser "wins" if he gets more "Electoral College" votes, a bizarre creation of the slavery-favoring U.S. Constitution. Trump will actually be "elected" in December, when the 500-plus "Electors" meet in their respective state capitals and the District of Columbia to rubber-stamp the preordained outcome with their own "votes."

4]  That's not to endorse Trump. His other appointments have been truly monstrous. A racist for Attorney General, rabid generals for key posts wielding repressive powers, a pro-pollution climate science denying fanatic to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a man at Interior to allow a free-for-all looting of Federal lands in the west and mountain states, and the dunderheaded and corrupt former Texas Governor Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy, a Department Perry vowed to abolish when he ran for president in 2012. And Trump's bankruptcy lawyer, a fanatical Zionist who wants Israel to annex the entire West Bank, as Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman. Friedman compares progressive American Jews to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis. Oy vey!

Trump wanted to out-Zionist Hillary Clinton during the campaign, promising to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The Palestinians can expect more suffering, and more death and destruction to be periodically rained down on them. Which is the say, the same they would have gotten with another President Clinton.

China Joins U.S. As Outlaw Nation

China’s claims over huge swaths of the South China Sea are illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

So ruled the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands. [1]

China is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and thus is legally obligated under that treaty to abide by decisions of the Court. [Fat chance.]

In reaction to the Court's ruling, China's government and media (which is part of the government) have gone into paroxysms of denunciation and hysterical vows to ignore the ruling. Even before the official ruling, Chinese propagandists were issuing crazed rants, for example a front-page editorial spewed out the day before the Court issued its decision, by the so-called People’s Daily, blaring a conspiracy theory line that the case was a US and Philippine plot against China, a sneaky trap set by the US and the Philippines with the Court acting as an accomplice.

[I might interject here that, contrary to my somewhat misleading title, China isn't just now becoming an outlaw nation. Its invasion and absorption of Tibet was a criminal act also. And it has long been guilty of numerous, severe abuses of human rights. Oh, and it invaded Vietnam in 1979, an act of unprovoked aggression. (Actually the "provocation" was that Vietnam had the temerity to overthrow the mass murdering Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. The U.S. was also mad at Vietnam for doing that.)]

China did not defend itself in the Court, obviously because it knew it didn't have a leg to stand on legally or factually, and it had already determined in advance that it would ignore the Court's decision. China claims, absurdly, that most nations support its illegal position on the series of disputes in the South China Sea.

The other nations whose feet China has been stomping on regarding their territorial claims and rights of free navigation and fishing, are Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei, Taiwan (which China insists is a mere "province" of China), and Vietnam, that last one a country China has repeatedly invaded over the centuries, including in 1979 with the connivance of the Carter regime of the U.S.  [2]

China is a lovely neighbor, eh?

Only the Philippines had the guts to bring suit (so far) against China. It filed the case last year.
China is trying to grab undersea oil and gas, as well as hog the fish in the area. It has been caught illegally fishing in the territorial waters of other nations in the region. In return, its navy chases the fishing boats of other countries out of international waters, which it illegally claims as Chinese territorial waters.

Part of China's scheme has been creating artificial islands, reinforced with military runways and bases, around which it then claims territorial waters. The Court rejected this tawdry scam in its ruling.  [3]

But the Court, lacking a navy, has no enforcement powers over China, It can't even freeze Chinese assets or bar China from the international financial system -only the U.S. has those powers.

There is a superceding law over all the formal laws and treaties in "international relations." It's an unwritten law; The Law of the Jungle. The principle of that "law" is, Might Makes Right.

In other words, as long as you can get away with it, it's "legal." Because you just declare it so.
Put another way, the powerful decide what the rules are, regardless of what's written down on some piece of paper they solemnly signed and ratified (aka a "treaty").

Such as when the regime of Bush the Younger declared U.S. torture wasn't torture, merely "enhanced interrogation techniques," a smarmy, slimy euphemism persisted in to this day by the U.S. corporate propaganda system, known by the opaque and evasive term, "the media."

And invading Iraq on a trump-up, transparently fraudulent pretext wasn't criminal aggression. (But the U.S. has been invading places since 1812. It's a tradition, you see.)

Speaking of the U.S, so far the U.S. response to China's contemptuous spitting on its international obligations under the treaty it signed, has been quite muted. Nothing from Obama, or even John "Skull and Bones" Kerry, the U.S. Secretary of State. Just an anodyne, milquetoast burp from State Department chief mouthpiece John Kirby, saying, while not being able to comment yet on the merits of the case, the U.S. supports the rule of law and peaceful efforts to resolve maritime disputes. (The merits were already decided, Kirby, by the body empowered to decide them! And the Court vote was 5-0. Sounds pretty definitive to me.)

Highlights of the absurd, evasive, head-ducking press release from State Department Chief Flack Kirby:

"The United States strongly supports the rule of law. " [Actually it only supports it when it's in the U.S. "interest." Otherwise fuck the law. See for example invasion of Iraq, torture, subversion and overthrow of "hostile" government, assassinations, gross human rights violations domestically and abroad, etc. In fact, the U.S. doesn't even respect its own domestic laws or Constitution. Its police are virtually above the law, for example. Its police and secret police routinely violate the "guaranteed" rights of the Constitution, and always have. Officials break numerous laws all the time with impunity. If a big enough scandal erupts from lawbreaking, such as Reagan's criminal Iran-contragate conspiracy, a price is paid- namely "embarrassment." Man, if "embarrassment" were the only penalty for crimes, I'd be a bank robber! (Not really. Unlike the people in power here, some of us have a moral compass.)]

More from Kirby:

“In the aftermath of this important decision, we urge all claimants to avoid provocative statements or actions,” he said, splitting the non-existent difference. Now you all behave yourselves.

"We are still studying the decision and have no comment on the merits of the case... As provided in the Convention, the Tribunal’s decision is final and legally binding on both China and the Philippines. The United States expresses its hope and expectation that both parties will comply with their obligations." [My emphases. So even-handed! The ruling went almost totally against China. And why does the U.S. "have no comment on the merits of the case"? The merits have been decided, you just effectively admitted, Kirby.]

In fact, much of the statement is written as if the Court decided nothing. It urges the parties to "clarify" their claims and "work together to manage and resolve their disputes." Well they tried that already, that's why the Philippines went to Court! China is openly defying the ruling of the Court, despite the fact that they signed a treaty agreeing to accept dispute resolution through the Court. Now what's the U.S. gonna do about it?  [4]

It has alliances, official and unofficial, with most of the countries on that list that China is pushing around. China has declared, quite furiously, that it intends to push ahead with its absorption of the various islands, reefs, rocks, and vast ocean area it claims as its property. The other nations cannot successfully confront China's military unless the U.S. military backs them up.

Best case scenario is that Obama steps up to the plate, and China backs down in a confrontation. But what happens in a decade or two, when China's military is stronger, maybe much stronger?

But there's no reason to assume Obama will even risk a confrontation at present. His punking out when Assad, the Butcher of Syria, crossed Obama's "red line" over using chemical weapons, does not inspired confidence. Obama is good at attacking the weak. Confronting even the somewhat strong is too risky for his taste. Backing down from China will be a green light for increasing Chinese aggressiveness.

THEY'VE THROWN DOWN THE GAUNTLET TO THE U.S. SO FAR THE U.S. IS PRETENDING NOT TO NOTICE.



1]  The Court issued a press release and the judgment, which they call an "Award," as English .pdfs, July 12. Click on the indicated links for those. The judgment is 501 pages, by the way.

2]  I remember well how the Chinese dictator at the time in 1979, Deng Xiaoping, came to the U.S. to be officially feted by president "Jimmy" Carter, and immediately after Deng left, China invaded Vietnam. Being a "cynic," that is, someone who isn't brainwashed by the crap in this country, I thought at the time that there was probably some connivance between the U.S. and China, given the timing, and the grudge the U.S. held against Vietnam for not surrendering after the U.S. killed at least 3 million Vietnamese, dropped 6 million tons of bombs on Vietnam (three times the tonnage the U.S. dropped in World War II), permanently poisoned the land with defoliants contaminated with carcincogenic, neurotoxic, and DNA-damaging dioxins, and the commisions of numerous war crimes and atrocities. Carter said the U.S. didn't owe Vietnam any apology (much less reparations) because "the destruction was mutual." (Yeah, the U.S. bombed Vietnam, and Vietnam shot down some of the bombers. So it's even.)

The Carter regime of course lied through their teeth and denied they'd had the slightest inkling of the impending invasion. (And this with the massive U.S. global surveillance system. Even if the Chinese couldn't resist sharing their plan with the U.S. so they could mutually gloat in advance, U.S. communications intercepts and satellite and airplane surveillance couldn't possibly have missed the military build-up on Vietnam's borders and the preparations for invading.) As it turned out, the Vietnamese beat back the Chinese invaders.

Some years later, the sinister Count Dracula lookalike, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Russian-hating Pole who was Carter's eminence grise as head of the "National Security Council," couldn't resist boasting about how Deng had told the American rulers of the impending invasion. The Carter regime imperialists couldn't have been happier.

Brzezinski, by the way, successfully plotted to lure the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, another crime he unwisely boasted about. [See Brzezinski in his own words, from Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, although I can't vouch for the English translation. Also "THE STRATEGIC MIND OF ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: HOW A NATIVE POLE USED AFGHANISTAN TO PROTECT HIS HOMELAND," whose author interviewed Brzezinski, former CIA Director Robert Gates, who oversaw an operation to arm violent Afghan religious fanatics, the so-called Muhajideen, "Holy Warriors," starting six months before the Soviet invasion,  high government apparatchiks Walter Slocombe, David Aaron, Dennis Ross, Leslie Gelb, leading Democratic Party operative Bob Shrum,  Jim Mowrer, and journalist Hedrick Smith.

There are brief summaries of Brzezinski's anti-Soviet plot, which eventually culminated in the Afghanistan we have today, at "Brzezinski Vision to Lure Soviets into ‘Afghan Trap’ Now Orlando’s Nightmare," Huffington Post, June 10, 2016.

Here's Brzezinski's flippant dismissal of the immense "blowback" the U.S. and much of the rest of the world has suffered from the policy he sold to his stupid boss, president Carter:

“What was more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold war?”
("Afghanistan: The Soviet Union's Vietnam," Aljazeera, April 23, 2003.)

Carter was and has often been sold to the U.S. public as a "peanut farmer," but more pertinently he was a career naval officer who served on atomic missile submarines. He was steeped and marinated in the culture of U.S. imperialism and anti-Soviet ideology. He increased the military budget by 50% during his single four-year term in office, a fact that is never mentioned in the U.S.

Carter also initiated the contra terrorist war against Nicaragua. And before that, to get around Congress, he secretly had Israel supply arms to the dying regime of the evil dictator Somoza. On top of  that, Carter declared that the Shah of Iran, rated as the worst dictator in the world by Amnesty International when he was in power, as a "good friend." As with Somoza, he tried to save him (and was considered a weakling by U.S. fascists when that proved impossible).

Jimmy Carter, getting to live to a ripe old age in his 90s, unlike so many of his victims, has reinvented himself (with U.S. media help) as some kind of Great Humanitarian. Yeah, right.
By the way, Deng Xiaoping ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few thousand eggs! (The "omelet" being the continual rule of bastards in power.)

3]  See for example, "China has reclaimed 3,200 acres in South China Sea, Pentagon says," PBS NewsHour, May 13, 2016. PBS is the Public Broadcasting Service, set up by the U.S. government and funded in part by large corporations and a slew of major haute bourgeois foundations, plus U.S. government money and viewer donations.

4]  I've reprinted the entire State Department press release here, so you don't have to have your ip address snatched up by the U.S. government and spyware planted on your computer.  But if you insist on verifying the accuracy of it, click on the title below:

Decision in the Philippines-China Arbitration
Press Statement
John Kirby
Assistant Secretary and Department Spokesperson, Bureau of Public Affairs
Washington, DC
July 12, 2016

The decision today by the Tribunal in the Philippines-China arbitration is an important contribution to the shared goal of a peaceful resolution to disputes in the South China Sea. We are still studying the decision and have no comment on the merits of the case, but some important principles have been clear from the beginning of this case and are worth restating.

The United States strongly supports the rule of law. We support efforts to resolve territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea peacefully, including through arbitration.

When joining the Law of the Sea Convention, parties agree to the Convention’s compulsory dispute settlement process to resolve disputes. In today’s decision and in its decision from October of last year, the Tribunal unanimously found that the Philippines was acting within its rights under the Convention in initiating this arbitration.

As provided in the Convention, the Tribunal’s decision is final and legally binding on both China and the Philippines. The United States expresses its hope and expectation that both parties will comply with their obligations.

In the aftermath of this important decision, we urge all claimants to avoid provocative statements or actions. This decision can and should serve as a new opportunity to renew efforts to address maritime disputes peacefully.

We encourage claimants to clarify their maritime claims in accordance with international law -- as reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention -- and to work together to manage and resolve their disputes. Such steps could provide the basis for further discussions aimed at narrowing the geographic scope of their maritime disputes, setting standards for behavior in disputed areas, and ultimately resolving their underlying disputes free from coercion or the use or threat of force.

Hooboy! This China thing is gonna be tricky! State Department Flack-in-Chief John Kirby. Maybe he should have taken the day off.

Self-fancied Master of International Intrigue Zbigniew Brzezinski.

"Peace and Love, Everybody!" James Earl "Jimmy" Carter.

Deng Xiaoping, erstwhile paramount ruler of China, finally deceased after a long, destructive life

Chinese Government Already Employing Trump Plan To Execute Families of "Terrorists"

Donald Trump should get along swimmingly with the Chinese autocrats should be become U.S. president. (That is, after he uses his amazing negotiating skills to tear up all the trade treaties with China and get better ones. Oh, and China's WTO deal too.) The Chinese rulers already put into effect one of his policy proposals, murdering the families of "terrorists." ("You have to take out their families," was part of what he said in a blood-curdling rant to the media.) Trump had in mind the families of ISIS members. For the Chinese rulers the terrorists are Uighurs (who are Muslims, as is ISIS) who fight back against Chinese repression with violent attacks.

To avenge a knife attack in September of 2015 that reportedly killed 50 Han Chinese, China committed a death squad raid in November, executing 17 Uighurs, including women and children thought to be the family of an alleged culprit. This occurred just weeks before Trump voiced his threat, raising the possibility that he got the idea from the Chinese. [1]

Trump is certainly amoral enough to commit such state crimes. And guess what? Obama has already established the precedent before either Trump or the Chinese, with his murder of the 16-year-old son of Anwar Al-Awlaki and the son's cousin and friends, in a drone attack on them as they ate by the side of the road, two weeks after killing the father in another drone attack. Which makes it passing strange that the establishment media acted as if Trump was advocating something new and surprising. Maybe they have amnesia. On purpose. [2]

The only public explanation ever for the murders of the teenagers that the Obama regime gave came informally from Obama henchman Robert Gibbs, when he was cornered by some young journalists and pressed on the matter. Namely, the Obama regime hated Anwar al-Awlaki, and thus was to blame for these U.S. murders. The way Gibbs phrased it also blamed the teenager for choosing a bad father. And I guess the other teens were guilty of being in the presence of a teen with a bad dad. [Here's the video of the despicable Gibbs.]

So maybe Trump just cribbed the idea from the Obama regime, and naturally didn't want to give them credit, since running as a Republican requires demonizing all Democrats (but not, ironically, demonizing them for the actual evil they do).

"Donald Trump Says He’d ‘Take Out’ Terrorists’ Families," Time, December 2, 2015

"Donald Trump Says Terrorists' Families Should Be Targets," New York Times, December 2, 2015.

"Trump on ISIS: Kill the terrorists' families," MSNBC, December 2, 2015.

"Trump: We have to take out ISIL members' families," Politico, December 2, 2015.

"Donald Trump on terrorists: 'Take out their families,'" CNN, December 3, 2015.

"Trump: I Would Intentionally Kill Families To Defeat ISIS," thinkprogress, December 15, 2015.

"Trump’s Call to Kill Family Members of Terrorists Is Quarter-Baked," National Review, December 18, 2015.

And the inevitable bald-faced lie from Donald "Slippery Eel" Trump: 

"Trump Says He Never Pledged To Kill Family Members Of Terrorists," Huffington Post, March 9, 2016.

All those videos of Trump saying kill 'em? Must have been a Trump imitator. Many, many, many people imitate Donald Trump. Just ask him. ["Donald Trump Denies Posing as His Own Publicist in 1991 Phone Call," Time, May 13, 2016.


1] "Police in China Kill 17 Linked to Mine Attack, Report Says," New York Times, November 18, 2015.

2] There were some ethical objections to these murders in certain more thoughtful precincts of the bourgeois media. But given how little commotion the murders created in the U.S., and how they are now completely forgotten, one is forced to conclude that U.S. society is gravely defective morally.

"Obama's Administration Killed a 16-Year-Old American and Didn't Say Anything About It. This Is Justice?," Esquire, July 9, 2012. Let me quote from the article: "Obama's expansive embrace of the power to kill individuals identified as America's enemies has transformed not only his presidency but probably all American presidencies to follow." Trump won't even be breaking new ground when he murders the families of "terrorists."

"How Team Obama Justifies the Killing of a 16-Year-Old American," The Atlantic, October 24, 2012.

"Robert Gibbs Says Anwar al-Awlaki’s Son, Killed By Drone Strike, Needs ‘Far More Responsible Father’," Huffington Post, October 24. 2012, updated April 8, 2013.

Lot of time spend doing this, unpaid.  Since the secret police stole the irreplaceable videotapes of the musical performances of my friend, I have plenty of time to attack their stinking system that I would be spending watching, digitizing, and editing those tapes. I'll be sharing the 40 years of persecution at their hands with my readers, with revealing details about the illegal operations and methods of the FBI, CIA, and police. They even used Mossad agents against me. Seriously. I won't be holding anything back.