Empire

Trump’s Foreign Policy ‘Missteps’ Are Destructive to Diplomacy. Good!

Posted on by Sassy Sourstein

I’m not ready to stop gloating about the loss of Hillary Clinton yet. When Trump is inaugurated I’ll turn the knives on his administration — for now, it’s still the Obama-Clinton administration and I’m still focusing on these cretins.

Liberals don’t even know there’s a forest, forget seeing it for the trees. This week in Facebook includes people horrified that Trump would even acknowledge the government of Taiwan, let alone congratulate its new president! This will enrage China, our largest trading partner! They even brought out the specter of WWIII, which they laughed at when it was said it would be Clinton who would start it. Thing is Clinton was going to start it by following through on a promise to bomb Russian troops in Syria. All Trump did was talk to the leader of a country that the United States arms and is sworn to protect — from China. And hey, China knows this. If these morons think China is just concerned with being “dishonored” *gong sound, deep bow* they’re not just racist, they’re also so stupid as to be dangerous. Give felons back their vote and disenfranchise these criminals of common sense.

These same “pragmatic” types will nonetheless spend their time shitting on the legacy of Fidel Castro who despite lifting millions out of extreme poverty, did terrible things to innocent people that objectively pale in comparison to anything the US has done to its own minorities, but forget that. It’s about the morality — but just in that case.

That’s not all Trump “fucked up” on the foreign policy front. In less than a week he praised the “dictator” of Kazakhstan, said he’d — horrors!! — like to visit Pakistan, “a terrific country,” and treated the British Prime Minister as if she were the leader of any other of the world’s countries. That last “disaster” involved him calling Theresa May only after calling NINE probably non-white leaders.

Anything that makes US diplomats “aghast” is fabulous by me. These slimebags deserve much worse for what they’ve done to the world’s people. They’re the ones who keep every country softened up for the plunder and just in case any objections arise, war. As I said in 2014

“Diplomacy” is what Washington calls its imperial scheming and the left falls for it. Diplomacy is cold war, and it often enough leads to hot war. It is not a peace-making endeavor. It is not a good thing to encourage. It is good to disrupt it, as Chelsea Manning — whose birthday is today! — did. Thanks to her, we know so much about the nasty, petty, vindictive, stupid, lying, thieving, murderous shit our hallowed diplomats do every day in subjugated nations around the globe. These are rich, powerful, high-born criminals that have served time in the upper echelons of our own evil government and its largest parastate corporations. They’re scum, and their work is the devil’s. The only real question is, why do these countries allow it?

I’m not interested in whether or not Trump knows that what he’s doing is destructive to the diplomatic system. It’s irrelevant. I know that the outcome must be good if these enemies of all good people are upset by it. That tells me all I need to know. Diplomacy as a tool of empire predates the birth of Donald Trump and unfortunately will outlive him. If he can put a few dents, intentionally or not, in these fuckers’ Mercedes well I’ll fucking take it.

UPDATE

Trump tweeted that the new Air Force One planes being built by Boeing were too expensive and should be canceled. When the markets opened this morning the Boeing stock took a dive! Can you think of a more deserving corporation to take such a hit? I’m loving the Trump presidency and it hasn’t even started.

If Putin Did Rig the US Election: Good

Posted on by Sassy Sourstein

6ddc93b8-ebda-49f4-a1e9-5b8d878f9ae9-1394-000002d18293cd32_tmpFirst, liberals laughed at the idea that the election could be rigged. And since this is a woke blog yes of course every election is a sham meant to allow the plebs to let off steam while the real decisions are made far above the pay grade of mere mortals. But some embraced the idea that certain, eh, corrections were necessary to achieve the correct result. One commentator on my Facebook, during the dying embers of the Bernie battle after Clinton was anointed, said yes, this is what Our Party does — they assure results that will give us the most electable nominee. Of course, her personal, professional, lettered, Brooklyned self naturally thought Julia Caesar more electable than someone who was obviously warm and passionate and approachable and likeable as a human being in exactly the same way people said about George W. Bush — despite the fact that she was contradicted by actual fucking polls! (I remind the reader that George W. Bush was elected our 43rd president.) Then during the final phases of the debate cycle, I literally saw a comment from a professional-type asshole using ten-dollar words celebrating this ruling-class rigging, in praise of the Electoral College, and its role in protecting us from barbarians like Donald Trump — and thank goodness for that!

Now, well, it turned out that absolutely none of that was true and we now have Donald Trump, whom the Atlantic-readers told us could not win because thankfully the election is rigged in the proper way, as our president-elect. And after scrolling through Facebook these last couple days, I must admit that I couldn’t be happier.

Sure, some of the less sophisticated liberals are just howling at the moon, crying for the end of this barbarism called the Electoral College, because a vote of 50%+1 is actually so much more democratic and just. But some of the more erudite sore loser-ass bitches are actually calling for the EC to “do its job” and vote for Clinton as president. This is not what the Founders intended! bemoaned one writer friend. You’re right, they intended to protect their vast landholdings and literal ownership of this country and its ruling institutions and a good percentage of its inhabitants. They literally couldn’t imagine a future in which a homosexual travel writer would call on their ghosts to install a woman who actually turned the shores of Tripoli into a haven for headchopping pirates as president. I mean she’s VERY rich and like Thomas Jefferson also devastated Haiti through predatory economic policies but otherwise I think they’d probably disapprove and maybe go for the schmuck in the gold tower.

In any other setting we’d call this a tantrum, and a pretty incoherent one at that. Wahh, the EC was meant to prevent elections of bad men we don’t like, now let’s get rid of it and/or appeal to it to not do the job we just got finished saying is critical to the survival of democracy in a polity of crazies. Sure all of this comes from different actual people in my feed but it truly, honestly! to me illustrates the utter intellectual bankruptcy of liberalism as a political identity, the complete fraudulence of its claim on logical superiority.

Earlier today people were passing around a link to Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein’s attempt to collect millions of dollars to “ensure the integrity of elections” — basically, it’s a recount. And as if people weren’t already tapped dry despite this fabulous Obama recovery, they’re being asked to fund it themselves — and five million dollars has been collected! Maybe this is to appease those cosmopolitan Clintonites who might want to grab her pussy in new and terrifying ways. But it certainly does seem like even the great green hope is not only actually lesser-eviling us, she’s buying into the Cold War Russophobia. Coming back in from that Moscow cold. And fuck that.

President Putin himself has smarmily ridiculed, in most satisfying fashion, the very idea that Russia could sway a United States election.

“Does anyone seriously think that Russia can influence the choice of the American people? Is America some kind of banana republic? America is a great power. If I’m wrong, correct me.”

Now I do want to remind you that the alleged rig was done via hacking, liberation and dissemination of actual, true information about the clownishly disingenuous, war criminal Hillary Clinton. Nobody serious is actually talking about the direct hacking by Russia of the actual voting machines, just of unjust influence via enlightenment upon the lowly scum we allow into a small, usually meaningless part of our political process.

But I just want to say this loud and clear right now. If Vladimir Putin and Russia had anything at all to do with the successful rigging — the actual hacking of the vote tallies — of the elections of this rotten, disgusting country, nothing short of tripping over a big currency war-devalued sack of rubles would make me happier. Nothing. If for once someone hit back at the United States successfully, I as an anti-imperialist must only cheer, and that’s even if it were just in a vindictive, destructive fashion. But if Putin were worried, as many were, that Clinton would go to war with Russia starting in Syria, then Russians AND AMERICANS owe a huge debt of gratitude to this great leader of men. He has not only kicked the empire in the nuts, he has potentially saved his people, and us, from a disastrous conflict. Not to mention the crossfire that would certainly be primarily borne by the tortured citizens of the Middle East.

Vladimir Putin, my hero. Thank you for being better than the Electoral College ever could. Instead of disenfranchising yokels, you did it to the banks, the arms manufacturers, the tech and media conglomerates, the real-estate speculators. I don’t know what a Trump presidency will truly bring, but in this moment, right here in the afterglow of this amazing display of lulz such as to make Anonymous jealous, I thank and appreciate you.

Comrade.

Diplomacy Is Shit, The President Is Evil, The Left Is Trash

Posted on by Sassy Sourstein

Today, Obama announced a mild normalization of relations with the Cuban state. That means a US embassy may open in Havana and you’ll be able to bring a few more trinkets back from Cuba legally. The travel ban will NOT be loosened for tourism. Caps on remittances by family members will be raised. The US will “review” the presence of Cuba on its list of state terror sponsors.

I’m not going to comment on the Revolution itself. As a Floridian I’m biased for several reasons, and that includes my anarchism. All I’ll say is that while condemning certain tactics, I understand them through the prism of imperialism. Fortunately, this doesn’t matter for what I’m pointing out.

The reality of what happened today, broken into individual facts, is less exciting than the joyful (or angry) explosions we’ve witnessed in the media. The White House released for the world a detailed explanation of its reasons for this diplomatic outreach. If you can see past the think-tanky democratization bullshit you’ll see a vicious plan to complete the domination of Cuba, probably ending in its total recolonization by financial capital.

Among the openly described plans are

1) a ramping up of rhetoric showing the Cuban government as a rights violator
2) making the Cuban government work toward US goals
3) “empowering” the Cuban people, code for continuing to directly undermine the Cuban state
4) injecting more US currency and finance into the Cuban economy
5) opening the Cuban market to more US goods
6) increasing propaganda penetration by allowing private import of telecom materials

This is more like a declaration of war.

But then, that’s what diplomacy is. “Diplomacy” is what Washington calls its imperial scheming and the left falls for it. Diplomacy is cold war, and it often enough leads to hot war. It is not a peace-making endeavor. It is not a good thing to encourage. It is good to disrupt it, as Chelsea Manning — whose birthday is today! — did. Thanks to her, we know so much about the nasty, petty, vindictive, stupid, lying, thieving, murderous shit our hallowed diplomats do every day in subjugated nations around the globe. These are rich, powerful, high-born criminals that have served time in the upper echelons of our own evil government and its largest parastate corporations. They’re scum, and their work is the devil’s. The only real question is, why do these countries allow it?

In the absence of these parasites on the world’s good faith, the US has in Cuba had to resort to bizarre (failed) assassination plots and other idiotic schemes. Key to these schemes is the USAID program, ostensibly an honest organization meant to aid the world’s people, but in truth a subterfuge aimed at kneecapping all attempts at self-determination that do not line up with US foreign policy goals. Cuba, possessing a government ideologically aware of the empire’s goals, has been hip to this bullshit from the beginning. They even imprisoned scamster Alan Gross, released today as part of the deal (which also saw the release of three of the Cuban Five). Gross is a USAID contractor who was cynically using the extant Cuban Jewish community as a shield for his service to US policy. Just look at this spook’s life. As we know, Ukraine wasn’t as savvy.

USAID has also rolled out a fake Cuban Twitter, tried to infiltrate Cuba’s hop hop scene, and perhaps most disgustingly — like Pakistan vaccination scheme-level disgusting — held fake HIV-prevention seminars. That’s just a short list courtesy of the Moon of Alabama blog, which has an amusing warning:

But should indeed a U.S. embassy return to Havana that job will fall again to the CIA. Cuba should be very worried about that. The only reason why the U.S. government has never fallen to a CIA coup is the lack of a U.S. embassy in Washington DC.

It’s well-accepted that US embassies are basically just CIA offices. Nothing good can come of one of these in Havana. We only have to look to Libya to see what can happen when relations are “normalized.”

At this point I can just assume the grizzled Cuban old guard is throwing its hands up at the inevitability of their loss to the juggernaut. I tuned in to see Raúl Castro speak for about 20 seconds and just in that one moment, watched him praise both Obama and the Pope. I don’t know who to roll my leftier-than-thou eyes at — Castro, or emoji-fist-raisers in my Twitter timeline lionizing him in that moment. These liberals dressed as radicals let their masks slip a bit today. Medea Benjamin, CodePink’s milquetoast maven of minivan dissent, has always wanted to love Obama, and now, for just a moment, she can have a day to unabashedly do just that.

It wasn’t just Benjamin praising the drone president and whooping it up for cigars and rum. Look at this fucking dingbat:

But liberals gonna liberal right? Well let’s reach a tiny bit further “left”:

wait there’s more

(hypocrisy!)

(Obama finally wins out!)

The twin whitebros of the libpocalypse are just the ones laughed at in my timeline, I’m sure there are even better out there.

But none of this is as dumb as this, retweeted by Glenn Greenwald, below, which, no.

A few hundred thousand Cuban exiles in a throwaway city, as Miami was in the 1960s, do not directly influence a multigenerational policy. They’re a great public excuse for one, and for political reasons it’s great propaganda. But the empire has its own reasons for making a communist island just 90 miles from its southernmost territories, especially one run by anti-imperialists, appear to be an innate economic basketcase. That’s what a crushingly near-total blockade can do. In exactly the same way, Israel is useful to the empire as a giant spaceship of white capitalism in a typically resistant Middle East. It has very little to do with Jewish power over Washington, oh my god.

The embargo was never total, but even that slack was for propaganda purposes. Connected US agribusinesses, for example, have been privileged enough to make millions trading staple foods to the Cuban government. Thanks to the US, Cubans can eat! Those farmers and possibly many more stand to get even richer in the near term from this thaw. Scahill and Blumenthal probably aren’t wrong to point out that, down the road at least, the hordes are coming.

Imagine, the venerable emoprogs of America praising POTUS for this sham “opening” amid the terrifying threats of that White House statement. All this from the bombingest country on earth. The regime that tortures prisoners (in Cuba!) and spies en masse. An empire that has spent the last century or more systematically binding the peoples of the world to its political and financial will.

Fuck it. Bust out the mint; let’s make mojitos!

————

for lulz

The Empire Isn’t a Thing, It’s a Concept

Posted on by Sassy Sourstein

In my daily falling-down-the-rabbit-hole-style perusing of the internet, I randomly rediscovered this great article by Alexander Cockburn (RIP) on the worst of 9/11 conspiracy theory. It’s an excellent take on how the focus on bizarrely minute details are harmful distractions from the world’s actual conspiracies, which unfold in front of us all the time. It notes the impossibility of such a conspiracy in specifics — yes, high-grade steel melts! — and through proven examples of official incompetence. Great stuff! But what if — it suddenly occurred to me — some hypothetical reader were to cite it as evidence of the ineptness of the empire? It’d be incredibly, almost purposely dumb, right?

Motivated by this Jeremy Scahill tweet, Kevin Dooley pointed out the flaws in the argument that the ruling classes just go around the world screwing up their foreign policy and are therefore stupid (and hypocritical!), causing “problems with their right hand that they try (and often fail) to solve with their left.”

Now, if one were to cite the very real failures of specific military or bureaucratic operations as evidence that the entire system of rule is fatally self-contradictory, one might be missing the point. Let’s say we weren’t to summarily dismiss the “Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake forever” example as illustrative of imperial action. Should the rake be seen as representing the individual operations of the empire, which can sometimes or even often be said to have failed? No, the rake has to be meant as the overall goals of the empire, or what even is the analysis? Humans fuck up? Tell me more.

When the rake hits face, is the face America/The West? No. It’s whoever is killed and impoverished. Oops! Bush fucked up Iraq! That rake really smacked him right in his smug face, huh, retired in his luxurious ranch sitting on millions of dollars. Or… maybe the face is the Iraqi people, over a million of whom didn’t even live to see Bush’s “fuck up”? Keep in mind that even when Bob smoothly sidesteps the rake and snatches it up in his hands in a single motion — a foreign policy objective was successfully completed — what the face actually must represent is still smashed.

Because “foreign policy” is evil and hurts people, in case that needs further explication.

This dissection does seem labored. Maybe we should just dismiss the rake-face angle as too goofy to engage.

One example I can see my hypothetical know-it-all picking out of Cockburn’s piece is the WMD controversy. They couldn’t even work out planting Saddam’s WMDs! Some all-knowing conspiracy, guys. Well sure, there were far too many people that would have to be involved in such a plot to actually carry it out. Better to realize that hey, they literally did not even need to find the WMD to “get away with” the invasion, as we have seen. So why even bother trying to manufacture it? As Cockburn showed, this is all a distraction from the real, successful, open conspiracy to destroy Iraq for power and profit.

We might as well say the subprime/foreclosure crisis was a disaster for the Fed, regulatory agencies, and the big banks. They created a bubble! Oops for sure man.

Fuckups don’t call into question the fundamental function of the system, which is to protect those at the top at literally all — every single ever — costs. I say function and not purpose because the system doesn’t require a purposeful unifying conspiracy, just like humanity didn’t need to be created by God. We’re here, you’ll have to work back from that. We don’t have an alternate reality. Humans exist. The upper classes rule.

“The Empire” isn’t a hivemind or even necessarily a purposeful entity, it’s shorthand for a concept, for what happens naturally in the system we have. That the various ruling factions don’t necessarily even directly communicate or aren’t privy to all the details of the system doesn’t change the true fact that the benefits accrue to them.

The “Ineptitude, Sloth, Distraction & Resentment” Cockburn cited are not a fault in the system, as behold — there it is, functioning, funneling the wealth created by the labor and ingenuity of the world’s billions ever-upward into the hands of criminal scum. We have the system we have, and we just have to gaze upon it to see it doesn’t require flawless execution to function as it does. To err is human, so error is obviously built into any human system.

This is why we can look at all the terrible “disasters” in recent foreign policy and yet see that there is no danger that military funding will be cut, that war contracting will be reduced, that war finance will take a hit, that weapons manufacturers will lose business, that politics itself will be delegitimized in the eyes of the vast majority of imperial subjects.

I know this seems like a silly strawman, and maybe it is. Nobody intelligent would actually imply that anti-imperialists think the empire is a perfect conspiracy with a staff of millions. In any event, it’s useful to talk through it even just for our own edification. Keep those analytical skills sharp! Just don’t poke your eye out.