Trump Loves To Create Sensation- Media and Politicians Still Don't Get That

They keep looking for a "strategy" and parsing his words to divine "what he means." He's just jerking your chains, you dupes.

It's natural to try to read the intentions of the president of the U.S., a position with far too much power for the good of humanity. But Trump is mercurial and capricious, so trying to predict his future actions is a fool's errand. What needs to be done is to put barriers in the way of his taking destructive actions, such as launching a military attack on North Korea.

Trump dropped one of his mini-bombshells regarding North Korea on October 5th, saying this is "the calm before the storm." What could he have possibly meant by that cryptic, ominous statement?

He had just publicly rebuked his own Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, for "wasting time" trying to arrange negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, thus torpedoing that option for a resolution of the issue that avoids war. (Unless the U.S. simply accepts North Korea's new capabilities, which is almost unthinkable, given the aggressive nature of U.S. imperialism.) Asked what he meant by "the calm before the storm," Trump replied in typical high-handed fashion, "You'll see."

The next day, Trump's reliably sycophantic press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, (spawn of one of the most loathsome U.S. politicians, Mike Huckabee), when asked by reporters desperate to learn the meaning of Trump's taunting tease, replied dismissively, "We're never going to say in advance what the President is going to do. You'll just have to wait and see," she lectured the roomful of reporters like a teacher talking down to a class of children.

Oh, great. So the "policy" of the Trump regime is to keep everyone guessing, always. That fits a Trump lifelong existential modus operandi, keeping other people psychologically off-balance. That in turn is part and parcel of his hyper-aggressive, solipsistic personality.

It's not an accident that Trump's allies have been gangsters (including Russian ones) and political gangsters like Roy Cohn, one of the most malign creatures who ever existed in the interstices of the U.S. power structure. From his work as a key henchman of Senator Joseph McCarthy, to his role in the murderous inquisition against the Rosenbergs, scapegoated for "causing" the Korean War (according to the judge who sentenced them to death, Irving Kaufman, whom the New York Times spent years running puff pieces on, slathering on thick layers of treacly propaganda to create a false reputation in a smarmy attempt to rescue the judge from deserved opprobrium) to his operations as a political fixer and obstructer of justice in New York courts, Roy Cohn left a trail of social wreckage and slime behind him. A raving homophobe in public, he was a homosexual libertine in private who ultimately died, ironically and perhaps with poetic justice, of AIDS, apparently acquired sexually.

There is a saying: Birds of a feather flock together. Likewise, pathological personalities clump together, forming nodes and knots of social pathology within a society, to destructive effect.

But since when are the politics of an empire founded on the twin pillars of slavery and genocide ever not anti-human? At least with Trump, there isn't the mask of benignity, as with his predecessor, The Drone Assassin and Perfecter of the Surveillance State. Ogres like Trump are perfect grist for the Democratic Party's "we're the lesser of two evils" mill, that political extortion racket they use to "force" progressives and decent people to vote for them. So the two-party political cartel continues its malign monopoly of power, preventing any real reform of the vicious U.S. system. (They won't even convict a single cop for murdering an African-American citizen, no matter how egregious the circumstances. THAT is a country that is incorrigible! And after a mass murderer gunned down 58 people and wounded or caused injuries to another nearly 500 in Las Vegas, the topic of gun control can only be broached gingerly.)

There is supposedly a Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Well we sure do.

A Trifecta of Trump Destructiveness

He sabotaged the attempts by his own Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, former boss of oil giant ExxonMobil, to start up negotiations with North Korea, putting the U.S. on a collision course to possible nuclear war.

His EPA is gutting emissions standards for coal-fired power plants. This is signing a death warrant for people, and additional disease. (But to be fair, it only affects people who breathe air.) Scott Pruitt, Trump's hand-picked EPA boss, was formerly Oklahoma State Attorney General, from which post he waged relentless war on the EPA on behalf of oil and gas corporations who literally gave him his marching orders in explicit instructions. His 14 lawsuits against the EPA all failed in the Federal courts. Now he is destroying the EPA from within.

He issued regulations allowing companies with religious or "moral" objections to contraception to deny contraception coverage in their company health insurance plans. Keeping Women Barefoot and Pregnant in the 21th Century! That's Making America Great Again!

So the man in just a few days is threatening mass murder, thousands of cases of disease and death, and denying a basic human right to control one's own reproduction and protection from veneral diseases. Winning!

I have the BEST IDEAS, EVER!

Trump Threatens Nuclear Obliteration of North Korea If It Makes More Threats: NK Immediately Makes A Threat, Calling Trump's Bluff

President Bluster still hasn't gotten the hang of this presidency thing, it would seem.

Donald Trump took time out from his 17-day vacation at one of his golf resorts to threaten the nuclear obliteration of North Korea if they so much as make more threats against the U.S.- not if they actually attack the U.S.

"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like, the world has never seen." And he said it twice, to make sure it's clear he was being deliberate and he meant it: "He has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said, they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before." (Well maybe some other world has, eh?) [1]

So, did that fearsome warning of U.S. fire and brimstone stop the North Korean threats? Within an hour, NK responded with a threat to nuke Guam, a Pacific island and site of important U.S. military bases.

After the North Korean threat to blow up Guam, U.S. Secretary of State Rex "Big Oil" Tillerson rushed forth to make reassuring noises. He reinterpreted and distorted what Trump had actually said to pretend all Trump said was that the U.S. could defend itself. He told Americans they could "sleep well at night," meaning no danger here. And the governor of Guam, a U.S. colony (the U.S. calls its colonies "territories," to pretend it isn't imperialist), advised his subjects that they were in no "immediate" danger. (Like, there's no chance they'll die in the next 15 minutes.)  [2]

But Tillerson's clean-up efforts were immediately undercut by "Defense" Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis, a former general, who immediately made another nuclear threat and sternly instructed North Korea not to try anything and to stop what it's doing, because that could "lead to the end of the regime and the destruction of its people."

In fact, for weeks Trump's "national security team" has been using threatening language against North Korea. Given the paranoid and fanatical and ultimately insecure nature of the regime, this is completely counterproductive. And since an actual attack on North Korea would be catastrophic for U.S. client South Korea, and very risky for the U.S., and sure to turn most of the world's population against the U.S., and create extreme hostility from China, it seems that the only sensible route is to try to calm North Korea, and strive for a reasonable goal like a freeze in North Korea's nuclear weapons program rather than abolition, in return for a peace treaty to formally end the Korean war and dialing down of U.S. military activity on the peninsula.

But that would be "weak." The U.S. is positively neurotic about "weakness." The most powerful nation in human history is actually quite pathetic in this regard. Instead of being confident in its strength, it feels that making any concession to an adversary is a gross humiliation. (Lyndon Johnson once referred to Vietnam as a dwarf with a knife which it would be shameful to not crush. The rhetoric is telling.)

What tripped off Trump's latest intemperate fulmination? Apparently an "analysis" from the DIA ("Defense Intelligence" Agency- now there's an oxymoron) that was planted in the Washington Post claiming that North Korea now had miniaturized a nuclear bomb so it could be put on a missile as a warhead, thus enabling it to actually attack U.S. territory with a nuclear weapon.

A word is in order here about the DIA's reliability. It stinks. One example should suffice to prove that the DIA can never be trusted:

During Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran in the 1980s during the Reagan regime, the U.S. sided with Iraq because Iran had been taken over by Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs after overthrowing the U.S.-installed tyrant the Shah. Hussein used poison gas against Iraqi Kurdish villages. The DIA put out a report claiming Iran did it- a pure, conscious lie. In other words, the DIA put out what purported to be an objective, scientific analysis that was pure disinformation serving a hidden U.S. political agenda. And of course, when later Saddam was converted into an enemy, the gassing of the Kurds was hammered over and over as part of the indictment of how evil he was. (The U.S., both government and media, are nothing if not supremely cynical.) Naturally, the fraudulent DIA report was never mentioned again.

And generally, secret police agencies like the DIA are composed of manipulative liars and cynical power mongers, fanatical nationalists and ideologues whose objectivity is, shall we say, somewhat impaired.

As for the current DIA claim that North Korea has already miniaturized atomic bombs, something it was supposedly several years away from doing: Could it be that this is more DIA disinformation, designed to cause trouble? It wouldn't be the first time the U.S. military worked to provoke war. Ever hear of the Tonkin Gulf incident? ("Hoax" would be a more accurate term.) And the DIA is an extremely reactionary organ of the U.S. military. The fanatical Islam-hater Michael Flynn, briefly Trump's "National Security" advisor and now a target for allegedly playing footsie with Russia, was made head of the DIA by Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama.

The Deep State, after all, considers itself the True Guardian of the National Interest. Presidents who don't go along with it are either manipulated to get in line, maneuvered around, painted into a corner, or neutralized. So who knows what byzantine plot the DIA may be up to?

Currently the U.S. Congress has been busily tying Trump's hands, forcing him to sign a law imposing additional punitive sanctions on Russia, barring him from firing the special counsel, grand inquisitor Robert Mueller III, and threatening to refuse to allow him to replace the Confederate racist Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as Attorney General. And the Deep State secret police agencies FBI, CIA, and the NSA, a military agency, have been planting damaging "information" against Trump, his family, and his minions, almost daily, in the media.

We just don't know if the DIA report is accurate or not. But the DIA is not trustworthy, so we can't assume one way or the other at this point. [3]

It would be worse than ironic if a nuclear war resulted from the U.S.' own disinformation. But then, the U.S. blew up the Twin Towers plus number 7 World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and ever since has reacted to its own self-provocation with a global jihad against jihadism and the perfection of the world's most complete surveillance state ever.

                                                                               Oooh, scary!

1]  Trump later added a false boast via Twitter, his favorite communication medium, that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is "more powerful than ever." (He does epitomize the unhealthy American obsession with power.) Actually the U.S. nuclear arsenal at its peak numbered 30,000 weapons, consisting of 20,000 strategic weapons and 10,000 "tactical" or "battlefield" nukes, such as atomic land mines, atomic artillery shells, atomic bombs carried in backpacks. The U.S. arsenal has been reduced to around 4,000 strategic weapons- still enough to destroy the world. Typically the atomic bombs are around 300 kilotons each- a kiloton denoting an explosive force equal to a thousand tons of TNT. A megaton is a million tons of TNT- the U.S. used to have megaton-range bombs, but with more accurate delivery systems and multiple bombs per missile warhead and bomber, the greater power was superfluous.

For comparison, the atomic bombs that destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, had estimated yields around 13 and 18 kilotons, respectively. The man who ordered those attacks on a defenseless, defeated nation, Harry S Truman (no period after the S, S wasn't a middle initial, S was the man's middle name, a fact that U.S. propagandists insist on obfuscating by putting an incorrect period where it doesn't belong) announced in part after obliterating Hiroshima, "If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth." How very Trumpian. Or Trump is Trumanesque.

2]  Guam is the site of U.S. military bases that are key to U.S. dominance over the vast Pacific Ocean. Its native inhabitants, ignorant simpletons, join the U.S. military, their conquerors, in large numbers. At some point they were made U.S. citizens, like Puerto Ricans, another U.S. island conquest and colony. Puerto Ricans have been used as U.S. cannon fodder since World War I.

3]  The DIA is the creation of Robert S. McNamara. McNamara, the notorious Vietnam War criminal and Secretary of "Defense" (War) during the regimes of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was jealous of the CIA, and decided to create his own CIA inside the Pentagon, the DIA. (As if the U.S. needed yet another malign secret police organ.) McNamara was supposedly a real intellectual whiz, who headed Ford Motor Company prior to his government "service."

McNamara had experience as a war criminal long before the U.S. destruction of Vietnam, it turned out. We only learned this when McNamara spoke relatively candidly to documentarian Errol Morris. McNamara reminisced about his time as right hand man to general Curtis LeMay, the psychopathic mad bomber, during World War II. LeMay commanded a fleet of giant B-29 bombers (much larger planes than the famous B-17s) which he used to burn 67 Japanese cities to the ground prior to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (His predecessor resigned the position as he couldn't stomach the requirement to slaughter civilians on a mass scale.) McNamara's role was to calculate the most effective way to torch the cities and immolate their inhabitants.

McNamara relates a particularly damning episode when LeMay said to him that if the U.S. loses the war, he and McNamara would be tried as war criminals.

According to Noam Chomsky, on the day Japan surrendered, LeMay launched a final 1,000 bomber raid on Japan, a particularly vindictive act.

LeMay went on to head the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, the nuclear attack forces of the U.S. Air Force. He was an ardent advocate for nuking the Soviet Union, and later Vietnam. The fact that such psychopaths routinely rise to the top levels of U.S. power is quite revelatory about the nature of the U.S. system.

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?

Rex Tillerson Is The Most Irrelevant Secretary of State Since William Rogers

 Rogers was Nixon's Secretary of State. Kept out of the loop, Nixon ran foreign policy himself with his henchman Henry Kissinger, a sycophantic brownnoser to power. Kissinger was Nixon's National Security Adviser until Rogers was tossed overboard and Kissinger became Sec. of State.

Nixon was a pathological creep who held his cabinet members in contempt.

I don't know if Trump holds Tillerson in contempt. He probably thinks he's better than Rex because he's richer (presumably). Tillerson has been nearly invisible. The top staff positions at State other than Tillerson are vacant. Trump is proposing to slash the State Department's budget by 28%- a huge downgrade.

Tillerson makes pronouncements that disappear almost immediately, like pebbles tossed into a pond.

For some reason, Tillerson refuses to allow the media to accompany him. Either he doesn't want to be observed, or Trump decreed this. On his current trip to Asia, he brought along on his plane just one pseudo-journalist, a propagandist who is designated to function as a shill. Two GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) operatives formed a fake "news" outfit a few weeks ago, and hired this young women with zero journalistic background or experience to pretend to be a reporter. She is the sum total of the "press pool" accompanying Tillerson in Asia.

Tillerson just made an empty threat to go to war with North Korea, employing the usual U.S. gangster lingo, the euphemism "all options are on the table." Except that war with the deranged, nuclear-armed North Korean regime would be an act of insanity. Aside from its nuclear weapons, the North Korean totalitarian cult has 10,000 artillery pieces aimed at Seoul, South Korea, the capital and commercial center of that nation. I don't think the South Koreans would appreciate having it obliterated.

But Tillerson has wasted no time in prnetsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt      oving himself truly loathsome. Since the bloodthirsty Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines last June on a platform of murdering "drug dealers an users," over 6,000 mostly poor Filipinos have been murdered in their homes and on the streets by Duterte's hit squads and independent "vigilantes." When pressed on this in Congress, Tillerson refused to condemn or criticize it.

See "Rex Tillerson Sets Off Alarm Bells in the Human-Rights Community," The Nation, January 12, 2017.

"I am NOT irrelevant, DAMN it!"

 

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.

Just How Chummy ARE Rex Tillerson and Vladimir Putin?

Rex Tillerson, head of ExxonMobil, has done big deals with the Kremlin-connected Russian oil giant Rosneft. Sanctions have interfered with the business. Now that President-To-Be Donald Trump has chosen Tillerson to be his Secretary of State, (assuming Tillerson can get through the required Senate confirmation process), there is much worried fluttering in the media about the choice. The fear on the part of U.S. elites is that this is yet another sign that Trump will reverse the Hate Russia policy that the U.S. has had in effect for years, especially since Russia resisted the U.S. takeover of Ukraine.

The rap on Tillerson is his lack of diplomatic experience (which is a specious  objection, as it is routine for non-diplomats to be made heads of the State Department, not to mention to plum ambassadorships routinely go to richcampaign contributors) and that Tillerson has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, which presumably means he will be "soft" on Russia.

Well, just how friendly are the two men? Perhaps these (genuine) photos can provide some clues. A note of caution: some of the captions may be less than wholly accurate.

Hey, I think they really LIKE each other!

 Looks like Vladimir knows exactly where Rex's funnybone is!

(And who's doing the translating here anyway? Does Rex speak Russian?) 

When two men come to trust each other, they confide personal things. Putin is reported to have said to Tillerson, "I get an itchy scalp. You're an oilman, Rex, are tar-based shampoos any good for that?"

Kickin' back in the Kremlin clubhouse, it's obviously not just about business for these two.

It's pretty obvious that Vlad is smitten with his new Best Bro, Rex!

Everybody brace yourselves for a jealous hissy-fit from the U.S. foreign policy establishment!