The US Government Punishes People For Helping Dying Children

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

In my article “The Evil of Killing Children,” I pointed out how the U.S. government, in an attempt to achieve regime change in Iraq, knowingly and intentionally killed hundreds of thousands of innocent children in Iraq.

Unfortunately, killing those innocent Iraqi children was not the only evil action taken by U.S. officials regarding the Iraq sanctions. They also went after an American man for trying to help the children that U.S. officials were trying to kill with their sanctions.

The man’s name is Bert Sacks. They didn’t try to kill him but they did prosecute him both criminally and civilly for trying to help the Iraqi children who U.S. officials were killing.

What specifically did Sacks do that caused U.S. officials to put him in their sights? He took medicine to Iraq. That infuriated U.S. officials because the medicine that Sacks took into Iraq interfered with their ability to kill more Iraqi children, which in turn, impeded their ability to achieve regime change in Iraq.

In a 2003 article entitled “Sanctions in Iraq Hurt the Innocent in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sacks explained the origins and consequences of the U.S. government’s system of sanctions against Iraq.

He began the article by focusing on the large number of Iraqi children that that the U.S. government killed with the sanctions. Quoting an article from the New York Times magazine, he wrote: “American officials may quarrel with the numbers but there is little doubt that at least several hundred thousand children who could reasonably have been expected to live, died before their fifth birthdays.” Sacks then cited Richard Garfield, a health specialist at Columbia University, who estimated the death toll among the Iraqi children to be 400,000.

We also should also note that when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright was asked in 1996 whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children were worth it, she didn’t deny the number and said that the deaths were, in fact, worth it. After she said that, no other U.S. official, to my knowledge, took her to task, either on the number of Iraqi children they had killed up to that year or the fact that the official U.S. spokesperson to the UN considered the deaths to be worth it. (The sanctions weren’t lifted until 2003, after the U.S. government had finally achieved regime change with its invasion of Iraq.)

While it’s true that several hundred thousand doesn’t rise to the number of people killed by Hitler’s Nazi regime or Stalin’s communist regime, nonetheless hundreds of thousands is not a small number of dead people. Moreover, while all innocent life is sacred, it seems, instinctively, that killing innocent children might be more evil than killing innocent adults.

Citing the New England Journal of Medicine, Sacks pointed out that during the Persian Gulf War, “The [U.S. government’s] destruction of the country’s power plants had brought [Iraq’s] entire system of water purification and distribution to a halt, leading to epidemics of cholera, typhoid fever, and gastroenteritis, particularly among children.”

One of the important things to note about the sanctions, which were continued after the war, is that they prevented Iraq from repairing the water and sewage treatments that the U.S. military had intentionally destroyed during the war. Naturally, that ensured that that the cholera, typhoid fever, gastroenteritis, and other illnesses would continue, particularly among the Iraqi children, who were dying en masse.

A 1991 Washington Post article pointed out:

The worst civilian suffering, senior officers say, has resulted not from bombs that went astray but from precision-guided weapons that hit exactly where they were aimed — at electrical plants, oil refineries and transportation networks. Each of these targets was acknowledged during the war, but all the purposes and consequences of their destruction were not divulged. Among the justifications offered now, particularly by the Air Force in recent briefings, is that Iraqi civilians were not blameless for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

“The definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear,” said a senior Air Force officer, noting that many Iraqis supported the invasion of Kuwait. “They do live there, and ultimately the people have some control over what goes on in their country.”

A 1991 New York Times article cited in Sacks’ article pointed out what U.S. officials were aiming for: “Ever since the trade embargo was imposed on Aug. 6, after the invasion of Kuwait, the United States has argued against any premature relaxation in the belief that by making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people it will eventually encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power.”

In a 2002 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a U.S. official was quoted on U.S. policy: “We have made it clear that the world would be better off with a regime change in Iraq. Regime change has always been part of United States policy.”

The article also pointed out, “After 12 years of sanctions, Saddam is still in power but more than 70 percent of the population does not have clean drinking water.” As a 2011 article in the Seattle Times put it, “For 12 years, Iraqis had bacteria-infected water. The result was cholera, typhoid and gastroenteritis. Add malnutrition and a shortage of common medicines. The problem was known; in 1992, the New England Journal of Medicine raised the alarm about it. By the late 1990s, UNICEF estimated that an extra half a million Iraqi children had died because of war and sanctions.”

The U.S. government just didn’t care because that was their aim — to kill as many Iraqi children as necessary with their sanctions until the Iraqi people cried “Uncle” and ousted Saddam from power and replaced him with a pro-U.S. dictator.

Enter Bert Sacks. Struck by conscience by the massive number of deaths that his own government was inflicting on the children of Iraq, Sacks traveled to Iraq with $40,000 in medicines to help the victims of the sanctions.

Not surprisingly, Sacks attracted the attention of U.S. officials, who deemed him an anti-American criminal for helping America’s enemies by bringing them medicine that could save their lives.

To make it appear that they were not objecting to Sack’s bringing medicine into Iraq, the U.S. government filed criminal charges against him and also levied a civil fine of $10,000 on him $10,000 for spending money in Iraq. They said that spending money in Iraq violated their sanctions.

The criminal charges went nowhere but U.S. officials pursued the civil fine with an obsession that bordered on the pathological.

To the everlasting credit of Bert Sacks, who can only be described as a genuine real-life hero for standing up against manifest evil, he told the U.S. government to go take a hike. He told them that he would never pay their stupid and evil fine.

U.S. officials went after Sacks with the same vengeance they pursued against the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children they were killing, harassing Sacks for years in an Ahab-like manner in their angry attempt to collect their $10,000 fine. While the money was no doubt important to them, what was much more important was sending a message to other Americans: Don’t even think of helping people in Iraq, including the innocent children we are killing, because doing so interferes with our foreign policy goal for Iraq, which is regime change.

Sacks stood his ground. Like Hans von Sponek, Dennis Halliday, and Jutta Purghart, the three UN officials who resigned their positions in a crisis of conscience over the U.S. government’s killing of Iraqi children, Sacks steadfastly followed the convictions of his conscience and refused to pay the fine.

In 2012, a U.S. federal court threw out the government’s claim against Sacks, which now totaled $16,000 with accumulated interest, based on a technicality. While the decision did not save the lives of any Iraqi children, at least in the case of the U.S. government versus Bert Sacks, good triumphed over evil.

The Economics Of Warfare Have Changed

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

Economists measure economic variables. That"s a problem.

They are but one piece of an incredibly complex puzzle:

• Behavioural psychology isn"t considered. Different realm... not their business.


• Warfare and the economics of it are measured poorly, if at all.

Consider for a moment the impact of technology on every aspect of life.

Now, consider its impact on warfare. Warfare, of course, impacts economics. Something worth remembering.

In medieval times, wealth was largely acquired by conquest. You rounded up a number of your kinsmen, grabbed the clubs, swords, and spears out of the cupboard, saddled up Smokey, kissed the wife goodbye, and rode into town, killing whoever got in your way and seizing the assets.

Brute force won. In fact, Smokey provided a lot of advantage. Certainly a man on a horse was worth more than one without. Gunpowder changed this. Manpower quickly became less important. A man with a gun was worth at least 10 swordsmen on horseback.

The first World War presented yet another technology, two actually: the tank and the plane.

Trench warfare was a mess. Generals being what they are - grounded in the past and thick - took a while to figure out that when the enemy is dug in and has machine guns, sending your men over the top into a blizzard of lead would mean they"d all die. Someone must have thought to themselves: what if, instead of charging at them with nothing more than sturdy boots and a metal potty on your head, we did the same thing in an armour plated type of car with a huge gun sticking out the front?

Enter the tank.

As for the plane. Dropping bombs on cities was far more effective than a man with a gun. Probably 100 times more effective and thus quite economical.

World War 2 saw the bombs grow ever more powerful, the planes faster and more agile.

And, of course, let"s not forget battleships, which came to dominate due to the need to control supply lines. And because they"d figured out that if you build them large enough, you can take off and land fighter planes on them, which literally meant that they were moving ocean-based refuelling stations.

You"d be forgiven for thinking that everything was going to keep getting bigger, more grandiose, more centralised, and more expensive because there was a technology developed in World War II, which was the seed stock for how it is that I can write to you from the other side of the world, and you in turn can receive it in minutes and at a cost approaching zero.

The Turing machine otherwise known as the Bombe was arguably the most significant element in the eventual success of allied troops in WWII. It allowed the gents at Bletchley Park to decipher far more rapidly Nazi messages and thus react in hours rather than weeks. Cracking Enigma, the Nazi"s encoding machine, was certainly one of the keys to the Allied success.

At its peak, Alan Turing"s machine was able to help crack 3,000 Nazi messages per day and by the end of the war, this totalled 2.5 million messages, many of which provided the Allies vital information about Nazi"s positions and strategy.

This, folks, was a massive step in what we call today, "the Information age". Turing"s machine was one of the earliest computers.

But what"s this got to do with the economics of war, Chris?

Look around you and you"ll realise that everything is becoming decentralised or distributed and deflationary as a result.

This is a result of the economics of business changing as a consequence of technological changes. Micro power grids replacing nationalised power grids, 3D printing allowing localised manufacture, ride sharing decentralising taxi cartels, peer-to-peer lending decentralising traditional bank lending, file sharing disrupting the entertainment industry, the Internet itself disrupting the newspaper industry, Facebook disrupting and decentralising content - I could go on.

What we"re seeing is power shifting into the hands of individuals or at least small groups as apposed to large groups.

This same dynamic is at work with respect to war.

All wars are won or lost due to either side"s ability to secure supply lines, logistics, transportation, provisions, military hardware, and communications. And the ability to pay for all of them. Just as any business which can"t finance its plans goes belly up so, too, does any army.

Now, imagine an army with the ability to decentralise all of these elements.

This army is actually technologically and economically backward. This doesn"t sound threatening until you realise that:

• This army can and does utilise the technology and economics of its enemy. No need to develop its own.


• Transportation is not only provided to them but provided by their enemy.


• This army benefits from acquiring its transport, provisions, and even military hardware from its enemy.


• This army uses the communication tools necessary to conduct attacks at fractional cost... tools produced more often than not by its enemy... now out in the public realm

Would this not be a pretty powerful army?

Now, imagine this army is invisible. You can"t spot the soldiers because they look like so many other normal people. Furthermore, this army has no discernible head to cut off. There is no HQ to attack. The soldiers are dispersed, almost impossible to detect, and have already infiltrated the enemy"s borders. Heck, they"ve been invited in.

Khuram Butt, Rachid Redouane, and Youssef Zaghba... the 3 terrorists who went on a rampage on London Bridge and Borough Market this week... were soldiers of this army.

How would you fight such an army?

Katy Perry thinks we should "hug it out". Teresa May wants to control social media. And London"s mayor Sadiq Khan thinks we need to just get used to it as it"s just "part and parcel of living in a big city".

That"s certainly true of cities such as Kandahar or Mosul, which unfortunately is increasingly what Europes cities are beginning to look like.

Clearly, none of these are solutions. An idiot can see that.

Washington just upped the US military budget so that they can buy more wiz bang jets and horrendously expensive clunky ships. Generals fighting the last war.

Pray tell, how they"re supposed to stop to some lunatic with visions of 40 virgins in his head and a bomb strapped to his guts in a crowded subway station? Europe"s leaders are even worse. Brussels is full of globalists and socialists who promote bad policies and then insist the whole continent pay for their mistakes.

The Western governments of the world are both clueless, ignorant and stupid. They"re also too afraid to call a spade a spade for fear of being demonised for being politically incorrect. But most importantly, they"re broke. This is a good thing because nation states which are a relic of the Industrial era are going to go away as well but that"s a conversation for another day.

Clearly they"re not going to solve these problems anyway, and, in fact, the economics of war have changed so radically that it ensures they"ll go away.

Remember, the most basic social contract a citizen has with his government is that of security and government cannot provide it.

The answers lie with private enterprise.

Private companies such as Stabilitas, who are using crowdsourcing, and AI are already doing more for individuals and businesses than governments are.

The truth is the economics of war have changed and that means that the technology that won the last war isn"t going to be the one that wins this one.

- Chris

"War is the ultimate realisation of modern technology." — Don Delillo

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This Is Why We Need The Wall

Rising death toll

Voronkova said the number of homicides rose in 22 of Mexico’s 32 states during 2016 and the rivalries between cartels increased in violence.

“It is noteworthy that the largest rises in fatalities were registered in states that were key battlegrounds for control between competing, increasingly fragmented cartels,” she said.

“The violence grew worse as the cartels expanded the territorial reach of their campaigns, seeking to ‘cleanse’ areas of rivals in their efforts to secure a monopoly on drug-trafficking routes and other criminal assets.”

Mexican drug cartels take in between $19 billion and $29 billion annually from US drug sales, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Rivalries between the cartels wreak havoc on the lives of civilians who have nothing to do with narcotics. Bystanders, people who refused to join cartels, migrants, journalists and government officials have all been killed.

Not on news agenda

Jacob Parakilas, assistant head of the US and the Americas Programme at London-based think tank Chatham House, said part of the reason for the relative lack of attention paid to Mexico in the international media is “it’s not a war in the political sense of the word. The participants largely don’t have a political objective. They’re not trying to create a breakaway state. It doesn’t come with the same visuals. There are no air strikes.

“Also this has been going on since the beginning of the modern drug trade in the Americas. It’s not news in that sense. And Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. They are intentionally targeted in Mexico, which puts a dampener on the ability to report on this.”

Drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is facing trial in New York.

There have, however, been significant arrests in relation to the Mexican drug trade in recent times.

Damaso Lopez Nunez, a high-ranking leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, was arrested on May 2 in Mexico City and could face charges in the US, authorities said.

His arrest follows January’s extradition of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who is accused of running the Sinaloa cartel — one of the world’s largest drug-trafficking organizations.

He awaits trial in New York on 17 counts accusing him of running a criminal enterprise responsible for importing and distributing massive amounts of narcotics and conspiring to murder rivals.

Former Afghan President Accuses Current Regime of 'Treason' For Permitting America to Drop MOAB

Remember Hamid Karzai? That was Bush"s puppet in Afghanistan, post Taliban. Thanks to Karzai, Afghanistan"s opium production rose an impressive 20x under his rule -- fulfilling an insatiable appetite for drug addled Americans in need of firm opiate-laced needles in their necks.

Now retired, he"s pissed off that the current Afghan ruler, Ashraf Ghani, permitted the United States to drop the MOAB on their ISIS loving asses, saying, "How could you permit Americans to bomb your country with a device equal to an atom bomb? If the government has permitted them to do this, that was wrong and it has committed a national treason."

Ghani"s  answer to Karzai"s charges was, err, freedom: "Every Afghan has the right to speak their mind. This is a country of free speech."

Clearly, Karzai doesn"t agree with Fox and Friends assertion that the MOAB is equal to freedom.

Why should Afghanistan suffer in such a massive way with a bomb so big, so dangerous that they themselves call it the "mother of all bombs".

— Hamid Karzai (@KarzaiH) April 16, 2017

More from the former Afghan leader, calling the bomb "poison" and bad for the environment -- because ISIS is all about preserving a low carbon footprint.

Local villagers said they thought the end of the world was upon them, after the U.S. dropped a MOAB on the terrorists traversing underneath the ground in elaborate tunnels.
 

Via Daily Caller:
 
“The earth felt like a boat in a storm,” one villager told The Guardian. He continued, “My ears were deaf for a while. My windows and doors are broken. There are cracks in the walls.” Achin’s Mayor Naweed Shinwari said “my relatives thought the end of the world had come.”
 
“Last night’s bomb was really huge, when it dropped, everywhere, it was shaking,” one resident told Reuters. He characterized the strike as a “positive move” to rid the village of ISIS fighters. One man who lived two miles from the blast area told CNN “we were all scared and my children and my wife were crying. We thought it had happened right in front of our house.”

 
Freedom.

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

"Couldn't Hit An Elephant" - Over-Confident NATO Generals & Russian Retaliation

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

Those are purported to be the last words of General John Sedgwick, spoken as he observed distant Confederate troops during the 1864 Battle of Spotsylvania in Virginia. (Historians debate as to whether these were his very final words or amongst his final words, but there is no debate as to whether he then received a mortal bullet wound to his face.)

Going back a bit further, British Prime Minister Lord North commented in 1774, with regard to the rebellious American colonies, “Four or five frigates will do the business without any military force.”

Later, in August of 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II (the last German emperor and king of Prussia) stated to German troops, “You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees.” He wasn’t alone. The phrase “The war will be over by Christmas” was a common one in Britain in 1914, often repeated by journalists and politicians.

Recently, US Lieutenant General Ben Hodges ordered over 60 US tanks to fire their guns in Poland. He later announced,

We"re serious - this is not just a training exercise. It’s to demonstrate a strategic message that you cannot violate the sovereignty of members of NATO… Moscow will get the message - I"m confident of it.

The general has reason to be confident. It can be said with relative certainty that, if the US sends scores of tanks halfway around the world to a country that borders Russia, then begins firing the guns, the Russians will indeed interpret that as a warning that their sovereignty is no longer respected by the US.

Of course, they already have ample reason for concern, as, in recent years, the US tradition of détente has been dropped in favour of continual blackguarding of both Russia in general and its leader in particular. Every prominent television news programme in the US has kept up a steady stream of invective against Russia, often reporting stories that oppose what most of the world recognises as the truth.

As to the generals, history is full of stories of military leaders who have demonstrated overconfidence and even eagerness to attack other sovereign nations. Do they seek to fight a great war in order to leave behind a legacy of their own personal greatness, or are they simply delusional—imagining their opponents to be imminently defeatable and their own army to be undefeatable?

It matters little either way. The attitude has existed for thousands of years and countless military and political leaders have made the exact same mistake in every era.

Interestingly, one consistent trait that we can observe is the blind confidence that accompanies the bluster and bravado. Leaders have a tendency to picture the glory of the destruction that they desire and rarely, if ever, anticipate a devastating pushback from their opposite number.

This of course results in a very dangerous course of events - charging ahead without taking proper measure of what the opponent might do.

Virtually every war in recent history has taken far longer to undertake than was originally expected. With few exceptions, wars that were intended to take a few months at best have dragged on for years. In many, there was no truly positive outcome—a cessation of aggression rather than a clear “victory” for one side or the other.

But, in the bargain, countries (even empires) have had their populations decimated and their economies destroyed as a result of the dramatic drain in wealth that’s a by-product of warfare.

All the more vexing then, that grown-up schoolyard bullies that make careless threats against other countries often succeed in setting off the spark that leads to war.

At one time, these self-possessed blusterers often needed to carry the public willingness to fight under their own steam. Today, however, they have the extensive support of the media. Every major television news programme can be counted on to offer supportive commentary by retired generals, who often are employed by the military-industrial complex. Further, the news anchors themselves add to the rhetoric like trained chimpanzees, hooting in support.

It all makes for exciting theatre, but, ultimately, it’s always the people of the nation that pay the price.

The next time a general effectively claims that Iran or Russia couldn’t hit an elephant, his bluster may, as has occurred so many times in history, prove to be the flash point for the next major war.

*  *  *

There’s a good chance the US could back its way into a major war soon. But war or no war, New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team think the US is on the brink of a major crisis. That’s why they are sharing this time-sensitive video. It’s packed with critical information on the looming economic meltdown. Click here to start watching now.

Making The Same Mistakes Again (Remember The 'Lord Clive')

Via Jeff Thomas of InternationalMan.com,

The image above is of the 18th-century home of friends in Colonia, Uruguay. Today, sitting on their back patio on the Rio de la Plata, I looked out at a small yellow buoy in the harbour that marks the final resting place of the Lord Clive, a large, 60-gun British warship from the 18th century.

In 1763, we British, already at war with Spain, decided to expand the venture to the New World. The Lord Clive arrived in Colonia, Uruguay, and began firing into the tiny town. With her heavy contingent of cannon, her captain was confident that he could do enough damage to make the Spanish inhabitants surrender. After extensive bombardment, the Spanish had still not raised the white flag; however, the crew of the Lord Clive had managed to set fire to their own ship. The crew abandoned ship.

Local accounts of the event have it that, swimming ashore, the English crew apologized for bombarding the town and asked for mercy. Not surprisingly, the Spanish killed them.

Of course, this is not the outcome that’s described in English history books. Although the defeat of the British on that day is acknowledged, the folly is not. Although historians will generally acknowledge a defeat, they’re often reluctant to mention any idiocy on the part of their own military. And so any English-language version of the story tells a different tale from the account above.

This is a great pity, as much can be learned from historical idiocy. Since it’s rarely taught, military leaders often make the same idiotic mistakes that their predecessors made.

As an example, we can look at the adventures of the US today and observe their serial invasions over the last fifteen years in the Middle East and elsewhere. These adventures are being pursued ostensibly “to make the world safe for democracy.” However, whenever the US takes over a foreign country, it puts in place a puppet government—not exactly the textbook definition of “democracy.”

And, of course, warfare is very costly. Choosing to invade multiple countries at the same time, as the US has been doing over the last fifteen years, is even more costly.

And the US government never misses an opportunity to portray the Russians as evil aggressors—an appellation far more suited to the US. On one occasion after another, Russia has sought to tone down the level of aggression, whilst the US has been conducting a shoving match with the Russians, goading them into conflicts.

This is extraordinarily foolish, as it would take very little to light the fuse of direct warfare between the US and Russia. Over the centuries, quite a few countries have challenged Russia, but Russia has always proven to be a very hard country to defeat. Although American films about World War II tend to portray the US as having won the war against the Germans, it was the Russians who did the lion’s share of the job. Even when poorly armed and poorly prepared, Russia simply throws another ten or twenty million men at the problem and ultimately wears out any attacker. Russians don’t necessarily like war any more than any other people, but they do have astonishing staying power. They’ll grimly see a war through, long after their opponents have lost heart.

In addition, China and others have stated their support for Russia, should the US get carried away with its aggression in the Middle East. Both China and Russia have stated that, should the US move on Iran, they will join the fray on Iran’s side.

It would be foolhardy in the extreme for the US government to assume that it could take these powers on and come out of the fight victorious.

But what does this have to do with the burning of the Lord Clive?

Well, as stated above, the captain of the Lord Clive had a massive warship capable of doing a great deal of damage as he bombarded houses, including the one pictured above. But the crew became so caught up in their zeal for destruction that they failed to extinguish a fire on board the ship and had to dive overboard, surrendering to the Spanish, who by that time were understandably not feeling particularly merciful.

The US is in a similar situation. It’s not exactly in the best shape at home. The economy is on the ropes, and a financial collapse may be imminent. The government is rapidly becoming more autocratic, and a police state is likely to be instituted in the near future. It will be needed as funds for entitlements dry up and those who now praise the nanny state find that they’ve been lied to all this time. Pension funds also are beginning to fail, and people in both the private and public sectors will be more than a bit peevish when they discover that this rug, too, has been pulled out from under them.

If we were to imagine the worst possible future for the US, it might go something like this:

• 
  

  The US invades Iran or directly attacks Russian forces in Syria or another country.

  
  


• 
  

  Russia retaliates and the world takes up sides as World War III begins.

  
  


• 
  

  For the first time in their history, the American people are angrier at their own government than they are at the trumped-up enemy their government has chosen to oppose.

  
  


• 
  

  The US government finds that it must fight a full-blown foreign war at a time when it’s fighting a second one at home.

  
  


• 
  

  All of the above takes place at a time when the US is broke and is economically unable to sustain a fight on either front.

  
  


• 
  

  The world turns against the US for causing this fiasco, and, for the first time, there’s no one standing on the same side as the US.

  
  


• 
  

  The US effort collapses and, like the crew of the Lord Clive, the US, in effect, abandons ship and asks for forgiveness from those it has invaded.

  
  

In the above scenario, we can imagine that the US would have created a situation that would maximize enmity from the rest of the world. (In 1919, Europe forced the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, not out of necessity, but out of vengeance. It served to cripple the German people for decades thereafter—both socially and economically.)

A final thought: Every night on American television news programmes, pundits, politicians, and retired generals perform their sabre rattling, stating that the world at large had better cooperate with the US or else. Whilst this bravado may appeal to a segment of the American population, the programming is also available to the rest of the world. We who aren’t American and don’t reside in the US listen to the threatening rhetoric and find it decidedly unsettling. More to the point, the world’s leaders are also observing these programmes. They have a similar tone to the Nazi buildup in the 1930s. To those outside the US, US leaders are becoming increasingly dangerous.

If this does play out along the lines of the sinking of the Lord Clive, it will be the American people who will pay the price for their leaders’ reckless behaviour.

*  *  *

An unpopular foreign war, an unwinnable fight with Russia, friendly nations turning on the US, economic collapse at home… Given the current political climate, it’s not hard to see how this “worst possible future” could quickly and easily become reality. In fact, New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey thinks it’s just a matter of time before the next crisis hits the US. Doug thinks the situation is so critical that he put together this groundbreaking video. Click here to watch it now.

Paul Craig Roberts: "Bannon Is 100% Right - The Media Is Now The Opposition"

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Bannon is correct that the US media - indeed, the entire Western print and TV media - is nothing but a propaganda machine for the ruling elite. The presstitutes are devoid of integrity, moral conscience, and respect for truth.

@TheLeadCNN @jaketapper

You"re not the press, you"re fake news!!! pic.twitter.com/ei0rEfRpyF

— ira (@idesignwis) January 26, 2017

Who else but the despicable Western media justified the enormous war crimes committed against millions of peoples by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes in nine countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Palestine, and the Russian areas of Ukraine?

Who else but the despicable Western media justified the domestic police states that have been erected in the Western world in the name of the “war on terror”?

Along with the war criminals that comprised the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes, the Western media should be tried for their complicity in the massive crimes against humanity.

The Western media’s effort to sustain the high level of tension between the West and Russia is a danger to all mankind, a direct threat to life on earth. Gorbachev’s warnings are correct...

The world today is overwhelmed with problems. Policymakers seem to be confused and at a loss.

But no problem is more urgent today than the militarization of politics and the new arms race. Stopping and reversing this ruinous race must be our top priority.

The current situation is too dangerous.

...Politicians and military leaders sound increasingly belligerent and defense doctrines more dangerous. Commentators and TV personalities are joining the bellicose chorus. It all looks as if the world is preparing for war.

Yet presstitutes declare that if Trump lifts the sanctions it proves that Trump is a Russian agent. It is paradoxical that the Democrats and the liberal-progressive-left are mobilizing the anti-war movement to oppose Trump’s anti-war policy!

By refusing to acknowledge and to apologize for its lies, euphemistically called “fake news,” the Western media has failed humanity in a number of other ways. For example, by consciously telling lies, the media has legitimized the suborning of perjury and false testimony used to convict innocent defendants (such as Walter McMillian in Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy) in America’s “justice” system, which has about the same relation to justice as genocide has to mercy. If the media can lie about world events, police and prosecutors can lie about crimes.

By taking the role of the political opposition to Trump, the media has discredited itself as an honest critic on topics where Trump needs criticism, such as the environment and his tolerance of oppressive methods used by police. The presstitutes have ended all chance of improving Trump’s performance with reports and criticism.

Trump needs moderating on the environment, on the police, and on the war on terror. Trump needs to understand that “the Muslim threat” is a hoax created by the neoconservatives and the military/security complex with the complicity of the presstitutes to serve the hegemony agenda and the budget and power of the CIA, Pentagon, and military industries. If the US stops bombing and slaughtering Muslims and training and equiping forces to overthrow non-compliant Muslim governments such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya, “the Muslim threat” will disappear.

Maybe Trump will add to his agenda breaking into hundreds of pieces the six mega-media companies that own 90% of the US media and selling the pieces to seperate independent owners who have no connection to the ruling elites. Then America would again have a media that can constrain the government with truth rather than use lies to act for or against the government.