China And The Decline of US Power

China And The Decline of US Power

By Dr. Chandra Muzaffar
Counter Punch
Monday, August 31, 2020

CONSTANT attacks by some US elites on China will, according to
some observers, diminish and disappear once the US presidential
election is over in November 2020.

This is unlikely to happen for at least two reasons.

One, the issues that underscore the targeting of China are
fundamental in nature and go beyond elections and personalities.

Two, at the root of some of these issues are questions of power---
of dominance and control--- whose resolution will span decades if
not centuries.

In examining the interface between the US and China, I shall begin
with those areas of conflict where the latter has surpassed the
former.

This will be followed by reflections on manifestations of US power
which are not as formidable as they are made out to be.

Conclusions will be drawn from these two categories on the
emerging pattern of global power.

Within specific sub-fields of science and technology, China appear
s to have moved ahead of the US.

Maritime surveillance and lunar geography would be two such
sub-fields.

Chinese advances in electronics and telecommunications have
also been breathtaking.

It is because China is at the forefront of cutting edge technology
that there is so much anxiety in the US and the West today about
China’s ascendancy.

Those who have dominated the world for so long know that it
is mastery over science and technology that endows a nation
or civilization with power and strength.

Its mastery over science and technology is one of the reasons
why in a few decades China has become the factory of the world
manufacturing a whole range of affordable, quality goods for
people everywhere.

China’s success in penetrating markets has made the nation
indispensable to the global economy.

Even in the entertainment industry, a video-sharing platform like
TikTok has become a sensation among the young prompting US
authorities to impose curbs upon it .

More than its production of goods and services, it is China’s massive
global infrastructure transformation through its Belt Road Initiative
(BRI) that is destined to have a lasting impact upon humankind.

An endeavor that spans 138 countries, the BRI connects Asia
with Africa and Europe through land and maritime routes.

It not only seeks to build highways and ports but also attempts to
initiate agrarian projects and accelerate industrial ventures which
will raise incomes and increase productivity of many poor countries.

Compared to the BRI there are other spheres where US power
appears to be overwhelming.

But if we probed each of these spheres carefully, we would discover
that US power is only a veneer.

Its so-called military prowess is a case in point.

Though the US has a huge arsenal and some 800 military bases
girding the globe, we forget that it has not won a single major
war since the end of the Second World War.

Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan testify
to this.

In fact, its involvement in wars in the last 50 or 60 years have been
unmitigated disasters.

Another pillar of US power is the US dollar--- the world’s reserve
currency.

The dollar is no longer as dominant as it once was.

In 2015 for instance, approximately 90 % of bilateral transactions
between China and Russia were conducted in dollars.

By 2019 “the figure had dropped to 51%”.

US imposed sanctions against Russia since 2014 following Crimea’s
restoration to Russia contributed to this.

The US also imposed “tariffs on hundreds of millions of dollars
worth of Chinese goods “which forced China to de-dollarise.”

Moscow and Beijing reinforced their financial relationship in June
2019 through a deal “to replace the dollar with national currencies
for international settlements between them.”

Russia has also been accumulating yuan reserves at the expense
of the dollar.

The US also perpetuates its global dominance through an extensive
propaganda network which projects the US as the greatest nation
on earth.

It is a portrayal which has lost its lustre in the last couple
of decades.

The US led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 which was unjust
as it was immoral tarnished the US’s image in the eyes of the
world.

Increasingly, it has come to be perceived as a rapacious nation
which has no scruples about slaughtering hundreds of thousands
of innocent people in pursuit of its hegemonic agenda.

More than its role in wars and all the sufferings they cause, the US
elite’s failure to govern effectively has shattered and battered its
image.

The coronavirus pandemic and the economic miseries generated by
it, have revealed that compared to some countries in Asia the US
elite is incapable of protecting the well-being of its own citizenry.

With 176 thousand fatalities and 5.68 million infections as of the
22nd t of August 2020,the elite stands condemned for betraying
and sacrificing the people.

If good governance is the hallmark of a ‘developed nation’ then
the US can no longer lay claim to that status.

The coronavirus pandemic with all its dire consequences has also
exposed how deeply flawed notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘the rights
of the individual’ are in the US.

When freedom of the individual relegates the collective good of
society to the margins, it breeds a self-centred obsession with
freedom which in the ultimate analysis undermines freedom itself.

If freedom and the celebration of the individual are the glorious
attributes of societies like the US, the pandemic has shown us all
how ugly their misconception and misapplication can be.

In a nutshell, it is not just the rise of China which is responsible
for the decline of the US.

Its own distorted perspective on power, its perverted sense of
individual freedom and most of all its lust for global hegemony
have all contributed to its fall.

This is why as the American people approach yet another
presidential election, they should for their own good reflect
upon their own flaws and foibles as a nation.

It is humility and honesty of this sort that is the need of the hour.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/26/china-and-the-decline-of-us-power

Democrats Are Officially Republicans

Democrats Are Officially Republicans

By Margaret Kimberley
Information Clearing House
Friday, August 28, 2020

The Democratic Party has ended any debate or dispute about its
true nature.

It is a party representing neo-liberal interests and international
gangsterism, just like their putative opposition, the Republican
party.

Even a cursory observation of the recent Democratic National
Convention proves that this assessment is correct.

There were paeans of love to the late warmonger John McCain
and even an appearance from his widow.

A special segment was set aside for Republicans like John Kasich
whose speech was used in part to beat down progressives and
make clear that Joe Biden wants nothing to do with them.

Not to be outdone with Kasich and McCain’s ghost, war criminal
Colin Powell was dragged out to put the bipartisan imperialist seal
of approval on Biden.

The convention was high on production value but skimpy
on details.

Speaker after speaker repeated that Donald Trump is a very bad,
terrible, awful, pandemic denier who cozies up to dictators.

They didn’t say how they would undo his evil deeds or make
life better for the average person in this country.

The awful Biden slogan of Build Back Better is meaningless.

That of course is why they use it.

The slogan may as well be He’s Not Trump because that is all
the Democrats had to say.

Of course the truth can’t be hidden for long.

Ted Kaufman was Biden’s Senate chief of staff and successor
after he became vice president.

He now heads the Biden transition team.

Kaufman told the Wall Street Journal that no one should expect
increases in government spending should Biden win.

“When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare. When you see
what Trump’s done to the deficit…forget about Covid-19, all the
deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going
to be limited.”

Government spending is exactly what people in this country
need to recover economically.

Yet they are told to expect nothing of the sort.

More austerity is coming our way regardless of the electoral
outcome.

The dust had hardly cleared when Rahm Emanuel , a former
congressman, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, and mayor of Chicago
explained what was obvious to even the casual observer.

The Democrats are repeating their failed 2016 strategy of wooing
republicans. “This is the year of the Biden Republican,” said
Emanuel.“No one should expect increases in government spending
should Biden win.”

No one knows that there are any Biden Republicans.

The presence of Republicans at the convention and a handful of
prominent people known colloquially as “never Trumpers” didn’t
help Hillary Clinton in 2016.

New York Senator Charles Schumer can never live down
his 2016 prediction.

“For every blue collar Democrat we will lose in western
Pennsylvania we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans
in the suburbs of Philadelphia and you can repeat that in Ohio
and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

The Democrats are letting us know two things.

One, they are de facto Republicans, and seek out Republican
voters by espousing conservative policies.

Two, they aren’t particularly concerned about losing.

They hope to thread the needle and win by using a strategy
proven to be a failure.

But devotion to their donors and their interests outweigh
everything else, including winning.

Disappearing any expectation of progressive policies is a
victory for them.

The serious Democratic campaign took place earlier this year when
the party establishment took great pains to defeat Bernie Sanders.

Black people were played by their misleaders into supporting
the same neo-liberal policies that are destroying their lives.

It was not difficult to do with a voting block that has whittled down
its demands to just one, keeping Republicans out of office.

Black primary voters were the marks in the con game, as the
Democrats coalesced around Biden and Sanders agreed to play
the role of dupe.

Lest we forget, Barack Obama once declared himself to be
a “Moderate Republican.”

Not that he needed to say it after repeatedly proclaiming his
admiration for Ronald Reagan.

There should be no surprise that his party now dispenses with
any pretense.

If Democrats choose to vote for Biden it should be with honesty
and eyes wide open.

There will be no holding feet to the fire, moving anyone left,
or expecting Medicare for All or a minimum wage increase.

A Republican will be inaugurated president in January 2021.

No one should expect anything different.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55511.htm

Class Warfare 101

Class Warfare 101

By William Manson
Dissident Voice
August 26, 2020

Starting around 1848, socialists flooded the world with pamphlets
and manifestos explaining the basics of “wage-labor” vs. “capital.”

Yet here we are in the 21st century, having to go back to basics —
even though one would think that the dire economic situation for
most people today “speaks for itself.”

However, given the recent misguided detour into side-issues —
notably, police-style racism vs. “anti-fascism” (whatever happened
to “anti-globalization”?) — a basic reminder about the primacy of
“class” seems to be in order.

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, beginning over 30 years ago,
socialism was peremptorily consigned to the proverbial “dustbin
of history.”

Marxism, we were told by innumerable think-tank “intellectuals,”
was a failed experiment.

Maybe a handful of the intellectually curious still go back and look
at socialist-Marxist literature — a body of writings once pored over
by countless millions committed to “world revolution.”

With the exception of students of Russian history, few will
remember how, as the Czar abdicated in March of 1917, a
democratic, multi-party Constituent Assembly was established.

By November, the Bolshevik power-seizure, engineered by Lenin
and Trotsky with the substantial assistance of the German high
command, dismantled the Assembly, banned the other (mostly
socialst-democratic) parties, and jailed without trial many
dedicated socialists whose positions displeased the dictator Lenin.

Freedom-of-the-press was immediately drastically curtailed — the
one notable exception being New Life, the popular paper edited
by famed novelist and humanistic socialist Maxim Gorky.

Before his paper was eventually banned, Gorky wrote innumerable
articles blasting the anti-democratic, thuggish totalitarianism
imposed by Lenin.

Yet in Russia, the Warsaw Bloc, and many African dictatorships this
Bolshevik-style of elite-bureaucratic, single-party and totalitarian
“socialism” was imposed — only to eventually fail.

The bogus valorization of “the people,” an abstraction, contrasted
with the subjugation (and sometimes murder) of very real, if
intractable, individuals.

Nineteenth-century Marxists, responding to the vestiges of serfdom
(and its transformation into a proletariat), were generally less
concerned about civil liberties per se.

In this brief article, I merely want to remind readers of
a few precepts of Marxism which remain as relevant as ever.

Lenin also admittedly offered useful ideas about “monopoly
capitalism” — ideas later developed by Baran and Sweezy
(1960s) and the editors of the Monthly Review.)

In reality, as economic conditions for at least 80% of the world’s
population have worsened in recent decades, Marxist explanations
seem especially compelling once again.

To begin at the beginning — the raison-d-etre of capitalist
enterprises.

How do the big shareholders of major corporations maximize
profits?

By the 20th century, relentless marketing of their “products” —
with its penultimate perfection in the all-pervasive conditioning
of everyone with multi-media exposure.

As the passive, beleaguered individual increasingly feels
insignificant, she correspondingly idolizes prestigious consumer-
goods (Marx’s “commodity-fetishism”).

But in every industry, rival corporations are forced to engage
relentlessly in “discounts”) and price-cutting–in the never-ending
effort to grab more customers.

The age-old solution (escalated in the Clinton administration):
mergers, acquisitions — and eventual “oligopoly.”

A major corporation, by eliminating and/or swallowing almost all its
primary competitors, can then, of course, raise prices back up. The
result?: more customers, better profit-margin, reduced advertising
costs, and so on.

The next step: break unions.

Claim that minority workers, whether immigrants or not,
are stealing jobs from the dominant ethnic group.

Nip in the bud any emerging sense of shared “class solidarity.”

Invest heavily, along with other industries, in a relentless campaign
of anti-union propaganda; confused employees, even overtly
threatened with reprisals, will then typically reject union
organizing.

But with such low, stagnant wages, offer employees various
schemes for “low-interest, easy credit” — allowing them the
illusion of such things as home “ownership.” (Such illusions are
often quickly shattered.)

Of course, by the late 20th century, corporations “racing-to-the
bottom,” scouring the globe in the search of the cheapest possible
labor-force (i.e., poor, economically desperate people).

Back in the U.S. and EU, superannuated workers suddenly realized
that they actually “owned” very little. With higher unemployment,
tens-of-millions of the desperate were, of course, forced to accept
whatever low-wage job appeared on the horizon.

Part-time, contingent labor verged on becoming the norm, as
corporations temporarily “used-then-discarded” employees in
order to maximize even more the omnipotent “bottom-line.”

By the early 21th century, even workers in the Tech sector — the
one dramatically expanding, relatively new industry — were reeling
from one such setback after another.

These days, Silicon chieftains are finding this COVID crisis of
2020-21 to be yet another “golden opportunity” to reduce the
labor-force of actual human beings.

Even before the “Luddite” rebellion by weavers (ca. 1811), every
step in automation has deskilled legions of workers, depriving them
of the income needed for survival.

In our time, with frequent saturation-points of consumer
“demand,” big corporations have focused even more on “reducing
labor costs” as a major, if not the major, source of increased
profits.

Today’s Tech giants, as arrogant as the steel-and-oil barons of yore,
are in the business of promoting all kinds of “labor-saving”
products, from online “education” (goodbye teachers) to robotics
(goodbye everyone?).

Marx of course described all these trends in detail, noting the
inevitability of downward mobility into poverty for such deskilled
and displaced millions of persons.

But one doubts whether even Marx could ever have envisaged
a world “owned” by 1000-or-so billionaires?

https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/08/class-warfare-101

Dear 8/24

Dear 8/24

By The Last Boy In Line
Monday, August 24, 2020

Dear 8/24:

Rest In Peace Kobe Bryant

Capital Punishment

Capital Punishment

By Paul Edwards
Information Clearing House
August 20, 2020

There’s no ambiguity in the term: capital punishment is killing,
carried out by an entity commonly, but not exclusively, judicially
empowered.

It refers only to the killing of persons, of course. Doesn’t it?

In this uniquely terrible time in America, when there is such
fathomless confusion and desperation, such vitriolic, violent
and conflicted fury in the adversarial masses, when we watch
the empty catechism of our national mythology shatter and
evaporate, when we are compelled to stare into the abyss
of all our historic falsity, pretense, viciousness and dishonor,
when national disintegration and death seem not only possible
but likely, to hold on to sanity one must try to understand how
this could have come to be.

How is it that a nation that had as close to a truly fresh start as
any known, that, free of the socio-economic bonds and fetters of
ossified, post-feudal Europe and unencumbered by the congealed
paralysis of tradition that strangled Africa and the Orient, might
have evolved according to the best Enlightenment ideals and
humane practices, has declined to a point where its political farce
is moribund and stinking, its economic reality is obscenely vicious,
and its whole society is crippled by anxiety, fear and racial hatred?

It’s not possible to trace and catalog the impenetrably tangled
complex of historical decisions and choices that, in aggregate,
over time, led to the critical, perhaps fatal, condition in which
we are enmeshed and imprisoned today, but that’s not required.

What is required is a species of miracle.

One that only occurs when mankind makes a quantum cognitive
leap from one universal, absolute, and ruling dogma to a wiser,
sounder paradigm.

The leap that must be made, and against which the odds are
astronomical, is from the petrified religion of Capitalism to
a life-centered, life-preserving economic system.

If this transition is not made and Capitalism is allowed to continue
its mindless, murderous assault on all life it will destroy the natural
world, including the human race.

That all humanity is not afire with passion to demand this leap
be made is due entirely to the managed ignorance and policed
impotence of The People perpetuated by the Capitalist Tyranny.

Capitalism has been a tool of privilege and power, and a cynical,
cruel, malevolent fraud from its beginnings.

In its simple, ingenious design it has proven to be the most efficient
tool for mercilessly exploiting human vulnerability and utterly
debasing rational government ever devised by the perverse mind
of Man.

Its simple basis is using money to extract surplus value from
workers paid the lowest possible wage.

In situations of general human poverty--which, historically was
nearly everywhere, always--Capital paid only the bare pittance
that could keep its miserable labor pool alive.

Marx, in his prolix, academically impenetrable prose, clinically
dissected and dismembered Capitalism long ago, but only after
its raging infection had armed controlling elites with a financial
bonanza that enabled them to own entire governments and impose
their vile dogma on the great mass of humanity.

It was sold as a means--the only one--to generate prosperity which
would benefit all justly, according to their contributions to its
success.

That was the mantra, endlessly repeated and affirmed by the
power of the state, that allowed it to assume the magical
character of a religion.

In Marx’s day, Capitalism evolved in an atmosphere of violent,
unregulated blood and guts competition, and enterprises stood
or fell, throve of failed, on the basis of “to the victor belong
the spoils”.

Many great fortunes in the 19th and early 20th centuries saw their
massive success and consolidation built of the bones and blood of
their out-hustled, out-maneuvered rivals.

That kind of open warfare, so damaging to so many Capitalist
entities, went out through the brokered collusion of industry
and government by World War I.

Socialism, ever its bete noir, saw its central tenets appropriated
to change Capitalism’s rules, to diminish raw competition, and
to shore up the howling fraud of private enterprise.

By the Great Depression Capitalism had become a welfare client
of nations and a bad joke for cognoscenti.

Keynes said it: “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the
nastiest of men, for the nastiest of motives, will somehow work
for the benefit of all.”

Though both critics and oligarchs knew its falsity, and though its
ruinous, catastrophic crashes had repeatedly rocked the world,
violently battering working people, its propaganda prevailed.

That humanity is ignorant and gullible is not news, witness America
today, and recovery from the fully metastasized systemic disease of
the Capitalist catechism is glacial in this nation of baffled, deluded
people, in spite of their long suffering under it.

J.K. Galbraith nailed its hucksters to the wall: “The modern
Conservative is engaged in one of mankind’s oldest exercises
in moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification
for selfishness.”

But that, too, is outdated.

They no longer search.

They make no effort to justify themselves and their crime.

Their power, entrenched and buttressed by rented governments,
permits them to gloat openly and flaunt their piracy.

They truly believe, in the face of the mortal chaos they’ve created,
that--as the Harpy, Maggie Thatcher, once boasted--there is no
alternative.

It’s not so.

There is today no continuity of what was called Capitalism.

It’s dead.

It doesn’t exist.

The phony artifact of classic Capitalism long since ceased to be
about initiative, cunning, and independent rapacity, and is now
a sick racket on life support, relying on government welfare with
no need to function efficiently or even adequately.

Trillions are funneled into it by the government it owns to fuel the
Imperial War Machine and fade the global crap game of debt and
derivatives it runs as a casino.

When bets go bust the state manufactures more fiat money with
less and less real value, jeopardizing the dollar hegemony that is
Welfare Capitalisms only support.

The Imperial State, borrowing from itself, and peddling cheapened
money to financially captive foreign governments to fund its
militarist follies and further enrich its billionaire owners, having
raped its own country’s natural resources, fouled the whole world’s
air, land, and oceans, murdered many millions of the guiltless poor
and helpless, and stolen its citizens birthright and future, teeters
perilously at the brink of implosion and meltdown.

Capital punishment, indeed...

When hope fails, magical thinking begins.

A miracle of human evolution is needed for life to continue.

There is no time left, and there are no options, no escapes,
no dodges.

Life forms must adapt, evolve, or die.

Contrary to our central myth, we are not an exception.

We must act now, and choose life or extinction.

This will be our finest hour.

Or, very soon, our last.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55472.htm

US: Crimes Against Humanity At Home and Abroad

US: Crimes Against Humanity At Home and Abroad

By Bill Hackwell and Alicia Jrapko
Dissident Voice
August 17, 2020

This month marks the second year since former President of Bolivia,
Evo Morales, announced to the world a campaign promoted by a
group of Latin American writers and academics to declare August 9
as International Day of US Crimes against Humanity.

Appropriately the day is to remember the second nuclear bomb
dropped in 1945 on Nagasaki, Japan that came just three days
after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Imagine how depraved and cold-blooded the then Democratic
President Truman could be to find that he had incinerated 150,000
people on one day and turned right around and did it again in
Nagasaki instantly killing 65,000 more human beings.

US historical accounts love to turn truth on its head by saying how
many lives those nuclear bombs saved when Japan was already
defeated before the bombs were dropped after 67 Japanese cities
had been leveled to the ground by relentless US aerial fire
bombings.

The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed as an
exclamation point on a proclamation to the world announcing the
arrival of the US as the world’s new pre-eminent super power.

It also served as an example that the US would commit any
murderous crime of any proportion to maintain that imperial
position of dominance and they have demonstrated that to
be true time and time again.


Even now in decline the US has never apologized for this
unnecessary crime because that could convey a sign of weakness
and a step back from a policy of nuclear blackmail held over the
nations of the world.

Obama had the chance to do that in the final year of his presidency
when he had nothing to lose in a 2016 visit to Hiroshima.

Instead of apologizing to the people of Japan or easing tensions
in the world Obama, in eloquent fluffy double talk, said, “Mere
words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared
responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask
what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”

The responsibility for the majority of suffering in the world was
then, and continues to be, on an imperialist policy and its inherent
neoliberal engine that violently throttles the ability of countries to
develop in a way that would bring health and prosperity for the
benefit of their majorities.

In the end it is an unsustainable system that only benefits
a sliver of privileged society.

The US crimes against humanity did not begin or end with
the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan.

As militant civil rights leader Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly
H. Rap Brown) pointed out years ago, “Violence is as American
as cherry pie.”

Since its inception the US has been ingrained with a motor force of
violent oppression against everyone and every country that stood in
the way of its expansion for control of resources and its entitlement
to limitless accumulation of vast wealth for a few.

The original thirteen colonies that rebelled against England were
not motivated solely by being taxed without representation but
more for the restrictions that King George had placed on the
unbridled greed of the white settlers to expand and steal the
lands of the indigenous nations and communities and to establish
a system of slavery which was the main source of capitalist
accumulation especially for the southern colonies.

At the time of the revolution close to 20% of the population
consisted of Black slaves.

Slavery actually ran contrary to British Common Law so the only
way the emerging class of landowners in the colonies could flourish
was to secede from the British Empire.

In doing so it established a pivotal component of the original DNA of
the United States; structural racism as a means to justify any level
of discrimination and oppression with a deeply embedded belief in
the inferiority of any race not white and Christian.

The cries of Black Lives Matter in the streets of all the major cities
and towns of the US today are a resounding echo of resistance that
comes from the plantations and the slave ships that came from
Africa.

The genocide of indigenous people in the US was its initial crime
wave against humanity as it expanded westward destined by God
to exercise their Manifest Destiny.

The early history of this country is littered with hundreds of
massacres of the original caretakers of the land from the Atlantic
to the Pacific.

And that crime continues to this day with Native Americans
suffering from the highest infection rates of Covid-19 in the country
as a direct result of government neglect and broken treaties that
keep the reservations in grinding poverty including in many areas
where there is not even running water.

On July 21 Congress passed a $740 billion military appropriations
bill, the biggest ever, and $2 billion more than last year.

The United States spends more on national defense than the next
11 largest militaries combined.

A well intended but feeble attempt by sections of the Democratic
Party to cut 10% of the budget to go to health and human services
failed because ultimately funding the 800 US military installations
that occupy territory in more than 70 countries around the world
takes precedence over something so basic and human as subsidized
food programs.

Meanwhile approximately 20% of the families in this country are
struggling to obtain nutritious food every day just as one example
of the growing social and health needs.

Wars and occupations are expensive and that money goes
right down the drain.

It does not recycle through the economy; rather it is equipment
and operations meant to destroy and terrorize, and the only part
of it that is reused is the militarization of police forces in
the US who are geared out in advanced equipment for the wars
at home not even normally seen in theaters of war abroad.

When Obama took over from Bush junior he vowed to end the war
in Afghanistan and instead left office with the unique distinction
of having had a war going every day of his 8 years in office.

He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries:
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and
Trump came in and did not miss a beat and has carried the war of
death, destruction and destabilization of Afghanistan into its
twentieth year.

The Pentagon knows that the days of outright winning a war are
over and relies now on hybrid wars that are perhaps even more
criminal. It is now wars of attrition with proxy and contract armies,
aerial bombardment, sabotage of infrastructure that turns into
endless wars, the intent of which is to make sure that a country
is imbalanced, exhausted and does not become independent or
develop and use its resources for the benefit of its own people.

This, of course, is not the only type of criminal warfare in the
Empire’s arsenal.

Economic sanctions are just as much a crime against humanity
as military attacks.

No one should ever forget the 10 years of the US orchestrated UN
sanctions against Iraq in the 1990’s that were responsible for the
deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.

Primarily through executive order Trump has put some sort of
sanctions on around one third of the countries of the world ranging
in severity starting with the 60 year old unilateral blockade of Cuba
for the crime of insisting on its sovereignty just 90 miles away to
the sanctioning of medicines and food to Venezuela causing the
deaths of 40,000 people, the outright stealing of billions of dollars
of their assets out of banks, and organizing coup plots against the
democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro.

Now the chickens have come to roost with Trump sending shadowy
military units of federal agents into cities like Portland, Seattle
and other cities like it was a military invasion of some poor country,
barging in uninvited not to bring order and peace but to brutalize,
escalate and provoke people in the streets who for months now
have been demanding real justice and equality.

The combination of the failure of the Trump Administration to
confront the pandemic with any sort of will or a national science
based plan, the existing economic crisis with its glaring separation
of wealth and the endless murdering of people of color as normal
police policy has exposed the system like never before.

The growing consciousness of a majority of the US population that
now seem to be getting that there has to be fundamental change
will be the catalyst for real change to happen.

It will not come from a government that does not reflect their
interests but only through a unity of struggle will we be pointed in
a direction that will push US crimes against humanity, at home
and abroad, to become a thing of the past.

https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/08/us-crimes-against-humanity-at-
home-and-abroad

Dear United Arab Emirates

Dear United Arab Emirates

By The Last Boy In Line
Friday, August 14, 2020

Dear United Arab Emirates:

Sincerely,