by Eric Zuesse for The Saker blog
America is controlled only by its wealthiest, and they are solidly in control of both political Parties. However, now that they are in control, they are fighting bitterly amongst one-another. They are on two sides. Concerning foreign policies, and domestic policies, Republican Party billionaires hate especially Iran, and especially all progressivism. By contrast, concerning foreign policies, and domestic policies, Democratic Party billionaires hate especially Russia, and accept some progressivism. (They need to do the latter so that they can be considered to be liberals and thus tolerated or even admired by Democratic Party voters. That’s necessary for them because, for example, Democratic Party voters would be just as turned off toward a politician who is financed by and fronts for the conservative Koch brothers, as Republican Party voters would be turned off toward a politician who is financed by and fronts for the liberal George Soros — and everybody knows that billionaires fund the major politicians; it’s not a totally hidden fact. Soros and other liberal billionaires can claim to be ‘public spirited’, which is necessary for them in order to be able to appeal to liberals; but the Koch brothers and other avowedly conservative billionaires have no need to make that pretense in order to appeal to conservatives.)
Actually, all billionaires are conservatives, because they need to be that, in order to call a country like America “democratic” instead of “dictatorial,” and they need that myth of American ‘democracy’ in order to prevent a revolution, which would strip them of their power. (No American billionaire calls America a “dictatorship,” even though it is and each of them knows it, since they collectively are the dictators here, and since they don’t become involved in politics, at all, unless they want to remain in control over it. The richer a person is, the more conservative the person tends to be, and billionaires are the richest people of all, so all of them are actually conservatives. Even billionaire liberals are conservative, because otherwise the individual would be fomenting revolution, and none of them is doing any such thing — what would they be revolting against, if not themselves? They can pretend to be progressive, but only pretend. Furthermore, every study shows that the richer a person is, the more involved in politics the person tends to be. Poor people are the least involved in politics, and this is one of the reasons why the U.S. is a dictatorship. It’s a dictatorship by the richest, and throughout thousands of years that has been called an “aristocracy,” as opposed to a “democracy.”
The first scientific study of whether the U.S. is a dictatorship or a democracy was published in 2014 and it found that America is a dictatorship and that its richest are in control over it. Only wealth and political involvement determined whether a person’s desired governmental policies get passed into law and implemented by governmental policies, the researchers found. Furthermore, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Consequently, the public’s desires are actually ignored by the American Government. It’s not responsive to what the public wants; it is responsive only to what the politically involved super-rich — the people who mainly fund politics — want. And those billionaires also control, or even own, all of the major ’news’media, and so their propaganda filters-out such realities as that the country is a dictatorship, no democracy at all.
Barack Obama was, from the very first moment when he became President, aiming to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government, and the reason for that was never made clear, but some people thought it was because Syria is allied with Iran, and some of them thought that it was instead because Syria is allied with Russia. When the Democrat Obama negotiated and signed the multinational pact in which Iran guaranteed that it would produce no nuclear bombs and the U.S. and its allies would end their sanctions against Iran, the reality became clear that Obama didn’t actually hate Iran (which the Republican Trump clearly does). Obama was invading Syria because it’s allied with Russia, not because it’s allied with Iran. His successor, the Republican Donald Trump, is just as anti-Iran as Obama was anti-Russia. Whereas the Republican Party especially hate Iran, the Democratic Party especially hate Russia. And that’s because their billionaires do — the Democratic ones hate Russia the most, and the Republican ones hate Iran the most. That’s the biggest single difference between the two Parties.
The main personal difference between Obama and Trump (other than that Obama was intelligent and Trump isn’t) is that Obama was a much more skilled liar than Trump is. For example, he was able to string Vladimir Putin along until 2012 to hope that Obama’s ‘reset with Russia’ wasn’t merely a ploy. On 26 March 2012, Obama informed Dmitry Medvedev to tell Putin that “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [the incoming President Putin] to give me space. This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” However, it was all a lie. The fact is that, already, Obama was actually planning, even as early as 2011, to overthrow the neutralist Government right next door to Russia, in Ukraine, and to replace it with a rabidly anti-Russian regime on Russia’s doorstep, which he was planning to bring into NATO even though only around 30% of Ukrainians wanted Ukraine to join NATO. But Putin had no way of knowing that Obama was planning this. And immediately after Obama’s February 2014 coup in Ukraine, around 60% of Ukrainians suddenly wanted Ukraine to join NATO. (That’s because the newly installed Obama regime propagandized hatred against Russia.) Obama won Ukraine as being an enemy of Russia; it’s as if Putin had wrangled a coup in Mexico and suddenly Mexicans turned rabidly hostile toward the U.S. But it was a Democrat who did this, not a Republican. And the Republican Trump is just as hostile to Iran as Obama was to Russia. These aren’t foreign governments that are interfering in America’s foreign policies; maybe Israel is doing that, and maybe Saudi Arabia is, and maybe UAE is, but certainly America’s 585 billionaires are. And they are allied with those three Middle Eastern countries. When America imposes sanctions against a country in order to wreck the target-nation’s economy, that target-nation is officially an ‘enemy’, and that’s because it is allied with or at least friendly toward either Russia, or Iran, or both. America’s 585 billionaires control America’s foreign policies, but disagree on whether America’s top enemy is (if the billionaire is a Republican) Iran, or (if the billionaire is a Democrat) Russia.
For example: If the next President is Biden, then conquering Russia will be the main foreign-policy goal, but if the next President is Trump, then conquering Iran will be.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
America (as in the united states) is not a democracy. Never has been.
It is a war-besotted nation, and has been all the way to its colonial roots.
Americans pretend to be democratic. They also pretend to love peace. It is not democracy … the quadrennial illusion is as much a myth for the American pretense of democracy as is the department of defense a misnomer for the department of war.
The rest of the world goes along to get along.
There are numerous epithets that describe the USA truthfully. Pathocracy ie a state ruled by psychopaths. Plutocracy-ruled by the rich. Kleptocracy-ruled by thieves. Kakistocracy-ruled by the worst in society. Oligarchy. All categories that overlap to produce the ruling capitalist parasitic ‘elite’. ‘Democracy’? It is to laugh!
Eric, today’s “political Parties” are in fact, “political factions”. Why? Because factions seek leadership from within the faction to rule the whole. A ‘political faction’ is not the same as a ‘political party’ (which rules through collective leadership, and would provide and produce, a collective culture of collected individuals: A Collective).
Briefly, the word, “party” consists of two terms: “part” and the letter “y” which adds unitY; such that a, “(political) party” represents the “parts united or unified”.
The only political “ideal” that can unite us all – is the political party for future progress: The Progressive Party. All other political groups are factions, maybe united in selfishness, but this does not make a political Party, where all the parts (citizens) are united towards one common goal – future progress (life).
Now, their maybe political factions (differing methods towards one common goal: Progress) within the Progressive Party, however, these factions at least acknowledge the primacy of The Party, and that the goal of politics is PROGRESS through the Progressive Party (unity).
I am not a member of today’s Progressive Party or that today’s Progressive Party is what I am speaking of. They may be, they may be not, I don’t know their platform – I am unaffiliated.
While I agree that political “parties” are far more important for developing and implementing policies, the future (if we are to actually survive as a people) does not lay with the progressive party or any party claiming to be based upon any abstract thought or ideology.
The truth is that all real meaningful political movements (at least those that actually prioritize the real interests of the people) will be based not upon ideologies, but upon nationalism (ie. what we call tribalism in the West). The only effective way for people to avoid being “divided and conquered” is to recover their true natural group identities. These identities have nothing to do with artificial ideologies like ‘progressive’ (which literally is nothing more than an ideology of destruction bent upon undermining the natural order of things), “communism”, “capitalism” or any other isms.
True natural political identities are based upon family, extended family, and the cultures which arise from the sorts of familial based nation groups (groups like Swedes, Finns, French, German, etc.). It is the natural grouping and self-identification of peoples who share a common language, history, culture and most importantly, genetic makeup. These sorts of natural groupings are the only real source of legitimate “culture”…You cannot create, or sustain, a culture based upon ideologies.
Currently we have White nations being destroyed with the slogan that they are “proposition nations”. No nation (not state, but nation) in the history of mankind has ever arisen based upon a “proposition” or any other abstract notion…not even religion.
No the future, if there is to be one, belongs to those peoples that can reclaim their own natural identities and cultures. Once a people has returned to its natural roots and self-identity, and only then, can they successfully resist subversion by alien forces. Only then will their people find true happiness and prosperity. Multiculturalism is nothing less than an attempt to eradicate these naturally cohesive national groups in order to open them up to alien (alien as in outsiders, not extraterrestrials) domination and exploitation.
We are doomed if we cannot come to understand this basic fact of nature. You cannot understand, much less grapple with, the JQ without this understanding. Its not about “isms” people.
Well expressed. But there are problems with this concept. For one thing, the modern world is organized as States not as Peoples. We expect loyalty to governments of the modern State not to national groups. This can result in dual-loyalties. But more importantly, applying this concept to modern states seems somewhat problematical. Germany for example, was not a cohesive State before the 19th century and is largely Catholic in the South and Protestant in the North with significant differences in culture and in dialect. But where problems really arise is in the modern colonial, immigration-based states such as the United States, Australia, Canada, etc. The population of the United States includes Poles, Italians, French, Swedes, Scots-Irish, etc. Not to mention Black, Asian and Hispanic groups. All of quite different culture, tradition and language. It’s true that there has always been the concept of the “melting pot” which assumes that the cultural identities of individual groups can be subsumed into an “American” identity which is completely artificial. But what would be the consequences of individual ethnic groups rejecting such an imposed identity and championing their individual agendas? I don’t know.
All national ‘identities’ grow up over long periods. There is no inch of land that has been populated by one discernible group, to the exclusion of others, for very long. One invasion, peaceful or violent, one population movement, slow or rapid, one diffusion of a new religious faith or of new technological and cultural methods, follows another, over centuries. The land stays the same, more or less, but the occasional glacial or inter-glacial period radically changes the climate, the vegetation, the animal populations and the behaviour of the humans dwelling in that place. And ‘identity’ grows only slowly, and is Protean, apt to change shape radically from one generation to the next.
Unfortunately ‘national identity’ is not even settled within the ‘nation’. All efforts to produce a solid, undifferentiated, identity end up being coercive, whether through violence, expulsion or internecine warfare, or by strict group brainwashing, starting with the children. I rather believe that humanity has no great future until we concentrate on our individual identities, and those of the human race as a whole, and that of Life on Earth, the one example of life that we know of in the entire, silent, Universe.
What is a ‘White nation’? European? If so is it Aryan, Anglo-Saxon, Mediterranean, Hispanic, Slavic, Scandinavian or some combination thereof? Is it merely racial, or is it cultural, and if cultural, which culture? Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, capitalist, social democratic, anarchistic, libertarian, conservative, liberal, non-conformist, ‘free’, or co-dependent?
American Indians said it centuries ago:
Spotted Tail:“This war did not spring up on our land, this war was brought upon us by the children of the Great Father who came to take our land without a price, and who, in our land, do a great many evil things… This war has come from robbery – from the stealing of our land.”
Chiksika (Shawnee): “When a white army battles Indians and wins, it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre.”
Hinmatoowyalahtq’it/Joseph (Nez Perz): “Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars. We shall all be alike–brothers of one father and one another, with one sky above us and one country around us, and one government for all.”
Satanta (Kiowa Chief): “A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers, but when I go up to the river I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber, they kill my buffalo and when I see that, my heart feels like bursting.”
Black Hawk (Sauk): “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.”
Plenty more wisdom at https://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-quotes/
And an article about the Iranians bearing in mind the saying “White man speaks with forked tongue”: https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/07/beware-those-who-speak-with-forked-tongues/
On Syria, it didn’t so much matter who Syria was actually allied with. The war on Syria is about Russia, but not simply because they are allied with Russia. Syria would not allow pipelines from Qatar and Saudi Arabia to pass through the country on the way to Europe. One could argue Syria did not allow this because they are allied with Russia, and one would probably be right about that. Still, the pipelines are the focal point of this war, not allegiances.
In 2011, Russia was existentially dependent on fossil fuel exports to Europe. Now, after long overdue reforms, this is no longer the case. Imagine oil and gas pipelines from Qatar and Saudi Arabia entering the European market in 2011, 12 or 13 still, capable of entirely replacing Russia as their supplier of energy. The Russian economy would have collapse and the clock would be reverted back as if the Putin decade never existed. Russia would have been forced to crawl to the west on its knees.
That was the best shot they had at bringing down Russia, they have 0 chance of bringing down Russia. There is no political way, there is no economic way and there certainly is no (and never, ever will be, not in a million years) military way of bringing down Russia. The US empire is too far gone now, has lost far too much credibility and Russia, in contrast, has gained far too much of its own.
It doesn’t mean they will stop trying, but they will not succeed.
Progressive parties in the West now are all anti-christian, anti-whites, pro-sodomites, pro-abortion and very anti-Russia!!
Those are not “progressive” parties; they are “liberal” ones. These is a substantial difference.
Dear Eric Zuesse
I have no dispute with your assessment regards Dems vs Republicans being essentially one in the same, or that the billionares and the super wealthy control the US and not the people.
What you have not addressed is how did the billionares become billionares? I suppose we are all supposed to know this, but it needs constant hammering. ‘EXPLOITATION of the working class!’ That is how the billionares became billionares.
To enlighten the people of the world, this is what needs to be understood above all else, otherwise there will be no significant change to the US style of ‘democracy’. (Which of course it is not.)
Thank you for your efforts.
Ian
by printing fiat money—– “to prop up the economy”.
aah finally someone has pointed out that them ‘americans’ are at odds with each others,great news to the rest of humanity.
Their private firearms will come in handy as they start cannibalizing each other for whatever dwindling resources are still up for grabs on US soil when the proceeds from imperialism are gone.
I saw Zuesse on RT America the other day, being interviewed by a fading blonde bimbo, like a Roger Ailes reject from Fox News. The ideology, and the mental vacuity were up to Fox News standards, but ‘Scotty’ wouldn’t get a second look from the bimbo selection committee at Fox, I fear, no matter how much she apes their ideology. Just what is the point of RT America being a Fox News clone?
It’s the same idea as the Russian Kleptocracy being a clone of the US one (or vice-versa).
Mulga, if you only realised that, nearly, everything you say, applies to all of the Kleptocracies (or the Global one), you’d be much more easy to read.
Anon, I make my maunderings ‘challenging’, so that you may grow through wrestling with the difficulties therein. Simplistic difficulties, the trickiest kind, are not meant to be ‘easy’.
“All billionaires are conservative”
So how does the author explain Soros, Brin, Zuckerberg, Winfrey, Hollywood executives who are all extreme left-wing liberals?
The wealthy elites 1% ers are all internationalist liberals who are pushing a NWO global agenda! Nothing conservative about them LOL. They all have more in common with each other than with their country of origin.
It is the middle class who are conservative as they are attached to their traditions, their community and their respective countries. They are also more attached to their true religion as opposed to the wealthy leftist who are satanist freemasons.
Regarding Soros,
according to Giliad Atzmon, Soros uses his money to fund a “controlled opposition” that is sort of leftist but mainly now based on identity politics and acts to enforce PC, political correctness, any anyone who gets off the “liberal” reservation with its globalist agenda. This is his thesis as expounded in a video I just viewed yesterday, here (“The Cognitive Elite of Jewish History”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ehx8-_tAfU
Most of the video is about GA’s analysis of the makeup of different elites and how they got that way, but toward the end (not sure exactly where) in response to an audience question he discusses the function of Soros in maintaining and enforcing the hegemony of globalist ideology.
Katherine
Years ago in a USA city I used to fund some of the liberal progressive rags, and about once a year the rabid jewish feminist nazi lesbians would attack me at a meeting ( almost always a Palestinian support event ), and would say that I was “David Dukes Brother”, and then the meeting would go into disruption, then about a month later a 10 page report would appear in the community detailing my ‘history’ with David Duke. The funny thing was having been born and raised in the area, unlike all the rabid/jewish nazi feminists ( they all seemed to come from NY or UK ), all my friends in the liberal community knew that all their facts were impossible, my point here is that you can’t really know anything about SOROS, and what he does, or why he does it because the ADL,JDL, & SPJC spend a fortune attacking anybody trying to do right anywhere. Then toss in KOCH who funds ADL,JDL,SPJC and every other pro-israel racket.
In my opinion Soros had a traumatic childhood, and he did good in UK, got an education, and went to USA, and learned to trade and got rich ( Quantum Fund ) like Jim Rogers. So now now SOROS spends penny’s of his BILLIONS on funding ‘open society’ and he gives so much money to so many different groups, he really has no ability to micro-manage, I think in his own mind he’s trying to do good. The thing here is that in my opinion SOROS is not in collusion with the enemy ( ADL,JDL,SPJC and their ilk )
Lastly, lets remember here, that the USA since day-one had one purpose, steal land from the Indians and re-sell it, bring in immigrants and make them debt-slaves, and take it to the moon, and you see KUSHNER doing the same thing in Golan Heights today.
The funny thing here is that KUSHNER is a Hillary Clinton liberal, lets not forget that dTRUMPf paid for Hillary NY senate campaign, that before Trump ‘kingmaker’ made Hillary, she had never held an elected office. Kushner is a ‘liberal’ but also a Netanyahu clone, Kushner even admits to sleeping in Bibi’s bed.
So they run a racket ( real estate ), they steal land, and enslave populations, where is all going just ask Sheldon Adelson, to make everybody in the USA/Palestine into a prostitute, Adelson owns all the whore house casinos on earth, and he plans to make trading sex for food a normalized family experience, for all ages young&old.
In summary Adelson got rich by prostituion, Koch got rich by stealing, like warren buffet, but at least soros got rich by day-trading, sure he broke the british pound, but somebody had to do it, and he could have just as well lost the bet like Hunt brother on silver; left or right isn’t the issue, the issue is figuring out whom is the biggest ASSHOLE
I must disagree. Soros is, in my opinion, a parasite, and ‘trading’ in the rigged financial casinos is the purest essence of blood-sucking. His stooge organs all work to protect and spread the cancer of neoliberal capitalism, which Evil system benefits the likes of Soros only. I suspect that he is a ‘bundler’ for other parasitic oligarchs, too.
Mulga — you ought to be tarred and feathered for such displays of rampant you-know-what. How dare you call Soros a ’parasite’ ?
And of course even mentioning a Jew in the context of money makes you a you-know-what!!!
Katherine
My degree, self awarded, in Comparative Human Entomology, gives me that right. My doctorate in Western Moral Supremacy has, however, encountered a few terminological, ontological and epistemological conundrums. I await Divine Inspiration to clear the path ahead.
There is no such thing as an extreme left wing liberal. Liberals are by definition not left wing.
Name one of the above that want to break up the banks, stop the wars, reduce the military by 90%, set the top tax rate at 90%, get off the fossil fuel highway to hell, provide free health care, the same as the politicians voted for themselves, and educate the younger generation for free, for all those willing to study.
These are left wing positions. Not positions by liberals.
It’s the same reason why Left wing movements are usually crushed. The Liberal ally with the fascists, or at a minimum don’t resist them. Now the liberals use identity politics and socially divergent politics to defuse actual leftist positions. Transgender bathroom are more important than total nuclear disarmament, for example. That is a liberal position, though it’s true that even parts of the Left have been seduced by identity politics.
RE “extreme left-wing liberals,” I think the point to made is that these billionaires sing a left-wing tune and fund all kinds of do-goody projects but it is all identity politics and reinforcing current power relations. Any attempt to dislodge the hegemony of globalist thinking is decried as nationalism/population/white supremacy/antisemitism/whatever—a menu of labels to prevent any basic questioning of the globalism agenda.
Regarding the do-goodoism of Melinda Gates and others of the billionaire ilk, all of these medical projects presume the essentail basis of globalistic thinking and also the idea that private entities should be making public policy.
No one should start to question the idea of where the billions came from, and perhaps they should have ended up as taxes paid to elected governments so that the public would decide public policyl and the govt. would have the revenues to execute public policy. Instead the public purse is impoverished and Gates/Zuckerberg et al inc are in charge of deciding who will eat, what they will eat (GMOs A-OK!!), what medical care the world’s people will receive (Big Pharma is A-OK!), who will be educated, and how (privately paid for education A-OK!), what a earth’s built environment and infrastructure and housing will look like (big dams and highways and no public housing A-OK!!), and last, what people will do with th eir lives and what they will think (robots and AI A-OK!!).
Call it Dystopia Unlimited, brought to you by Earth’s so friendly billionaires!
Katherine
Identity Politics is the cleverest and most extreme form of ‘Divide and Rule’ tactics that the ruling parasites have ever created-so far. Who cares if the world is dying, thermo-nuclear war beckons, the poor are starving and the homeless living amidst human faeces and typhus, if my trans-gender toilet is the wrong colour?
A question, asked with respect…
Does a middle class person’s curiosity about the world, not just the country he was born in, a sign of degenerate, globalist thinking? To my mind, the answer is absolutely not. And I’m sure persecuted Hondurans trying to cross the Rio Grand would agree with me. Same is true for Syrian refugees who have been streaming to Europe since European states decided follow Uncle Sam’s orders, and help demolish Syria.
There a lot of word games being played, everywhere, and I won’t know how you would answer my question without asking you. I’m not rich, and I like living in heterogeneous environments — culturally and ethnically. Does that make me not a very good person in your opinion, or in the opinion of The Saker’s regular readers? (I’m asking you to speculate about the opinion of The Saker’s regular readers.)
If I had a choice between being comfortably stuck in Texas and being an uncomfortable degenerate globalist, I’ll chose degenerate globalist every time.
ERRATA: “some European states decided follow Uncle Sam’s orders”
I am at a loss for words. Maybe words and meanings of words have become twisted in the laste 2 decades.
How can a billionaire be an extremists “leftist”? Seriously, I am asking you.
If you are repeating that drivel, you are furthering the dividing propaganda the elite has planted inside the “left”.
You know, the worker class. The exploited, the creators of surplus.
Please stop attributing todays politics of identification with victims, thus gaining power over your empathic centre, to what the left parties truly represented.
It ain’t left/right, conservative-liberal, its corruption&mass-murder. Money is the blood of human society, and the super rich control the flow.
Warren Buffet, most of his money that is/was spent was spent by “SUSIE”, his beloved wife, who tripped out to San Franciso with BILLIONS ( they remained married ), but essentially Susie became a love child hippy, who had been a good mid-western wife, but upon being one of the richest women in the world decided to do ‘good’.
So she spent 100’s of millions on liberal causes in San-Fran, she’s dead now, but she influenced Buffet to the extent that most of his wealth will go to ‘do-gooder’ causes, similar to Bill Gates.
Now the thing here is Buffet & Gates are RICH, but they made their money by being conservative.
None of this is NEW, Churchill said a LONG TIME AGO, ” when your young if your not liberal, you don’t have a heart, when old if your not conservative, you don’t have a brain”;
NOW to clarify this situation in REALITY, I would say “When young, if your not conservative, you will NEVER get rich”, now when old its normal to want to do something with your riches, you help those you care about, or you help the world if your super rich.
As self-made wealthy men all know the worst thing you can do is give money to people or your kids, which just makes them lazy, but I think what Gates is doing in Africa essentially is a good idea, I mean I have traveled the entire world, and I did a private safari ( just me & a buddy in a land-cruiser ) across Africa 30+ years ago, and I can tell you, that most people I saw drank muddy water out of a river/pond, just like the animals, and most people lived out in the desert in mud-huts, just like beavers make homes on a river. So I’m well aware that a billionaire could buy water for all of Africa, and still not bring them up Maslows Hierarchy, its a tough nut bringing up people from zero; The NUMBER ONE thing I heard when traveling was “OK, I spent my familys wealth on an education, and now what? The only job I can set is a guide, and there are no tourists”; Essentially we’re always told that “Education solves all”, but many young african men told me all too well that they were better off back in the family village, than living like a convict in Nairobi ( or any african city ); In general people are always happier in the family village, than in the city trying to get ‘rich’, young girls who go to the city just get pregnant and aides, and young men just get aides. Stay in the village and you get a beautiful wife, and beautiful children. It doesn’t take much IQ to make the right decision.
HOW DO RICH MEN REALLY THING”
Much of this analysis is what I call ‘sour grapes’, as a person who spent my early years in politics, and fought many battles I learned along the way, that most elected people were idiots, and that all the press had ‘owners’, that behind every progressive/liberal cause there was a ‘rich guy’;
In my humble opinion, we all try to influence some run down the road naked, others spend money to influence liberal minds.
This is an old problem, but I think HL Mencken summed it up best in the 1930’s. He said “Why do rich spend their money on crap like boats, or houses, when they could really muck stuff up and then just watch the fun”, Mencken advocated buying every Black person in the USA a Koran, and making every black a 100% muslim and then just step back and watch the fun, in a way this is exactly what the CIA has done, as they created the ‘terrorist’, can you imagine if some rich guy in the 1930’s had radicalized USA blacks like the CIA has done with ISIS in Syria/Libya/Iraq, but right here in USA? I don’t think the Black-Panthers of 1960’s counts that was just native black-militia.
In summary, like the Batman said in the Dark-Night, some people just burn money, and want the world to burn, in my humble opinion the Koch Brothers who feed the CIA, are certainly the kind; But then SOROS with his ‘OPEN SOCIETY”, certainly also creates the DUAL Psychopath that is needed; Like the Georgia Guidestones, or the Deagle Report ( USA population to be 80M by 2020 ), most Oligarchs agree LEFT&RIGHT that world population needs to be culled down to 500M.
Humanity would be vastly better off with a population of one or two billion. It’s how you get there that is crucial. Done humanely, by poverty reduction through redistribution of wealth from the elite parasites, female education and emancipation and readily available and safe contraception, would take a half century or so, I imagine. Left unattended, the Malthusian reduction much desired by the ruling elites will do it violently and cruelly, either through the ecological Holocaust currently rapidly quickening, or thermo-nuclear or biological war.
*SIGH* Liberals, lions, bears and the NWO again.
Serbian girl, the wealthiest in every empire, including both Roman empires and almost every modern nation state, have always been conservative. Soros, Brin, Zuckerberg, Winfrey and Hollywood executives are all extremely conservative people and executives.
Did you know all Hollywood scripts have to pass CIA censorship before they are squirted down the gullets of the great unwashed? Did you know that no matter how many black, hispanic, yellow, purple-polka-dotted, gay and trans employees inhabit that organization’s rainbow flag waving HQ, the CIA will remain a violent conservative terrorist organization until it is de-funded and replaced by a another three initial conservative terrorist organization? Homosexuals can be just as conservative as you. There is no correlation between sexual orientation, gender or race, and one’s liberality or illiberality. Ernst Röhm was not an outlier, he was a fascist militia thug who happened to hate Jews, and prefer men over women. There is a strong correlation between one’s independently, willfully informed concern for the public welfare — 500+ billionaires excluded, billions of The Other included — and one’s liberality or illiberality.
These liberals you speak of are illiberal in the extreme; the identity politics you and I both dislike for different reasons is a con to win votes of formerly marginalized groups which you seem to despise on principal. In return for votes, gratuitous pandering makes fooled groups feel part of the conservatives’ gang. In today’s US, as long as the majority in “formerly” marginalized groups continue giving the thumbs up to garch ownership of all politicians at the state and federal level, to the resulting destruction of the middle class, to the permanent end of privacy, and the OK to routine torture and mass murder, (D)s will say nice things about them while making sure the (D)’s billionaire owners are well fed. And the (R)s will always pander to the Christian and/or Caucasian voters who also endorse the same: destruction of the middle class economy, permanent war, and the death of privacy and dissent.
The US race to the bottom accelerates for all but the scum floating on top, laughing all the way to their banks. They laugh at two kinds of collaborator: (1) those who look for scapegoats behind them, the even more disenfranchised waiting in line far behind them, but not out of sight, and (2) those who delight in their apparent acceptance into the fold, not giving a s*** about their betrayal of themselves, and the displacement, torture and slaughter of millions of people they will never have to look at. No matter how conservative and illiberal voters are conned, they all lose the same things.
There is no such thing as The World Government, or NWO as you call it. This is an old order, or rather an old chaos, with new technology that helps “legal” capital circle the globe in milliseconds, and kill “illegally” migrating labor at a slightly slower rate. But as before we were born, there are thousands of conflicting agendas within each large nation state, including the intestine discord between the US’ conservative and illiberal billionaire factions, as described in this article. The largest corporations fight each other (but not the NSA and CIA), and espionage & military branches compete for the biggest welfare checks. Trump highlights this reality by provoking various Alphabet Stasi factions into public pissing contests. Internationally, there are massive splits in The World Government. The US and China are in a trade war that affects billionaires profits in both countries. Russia and the US are walking on egg shells, trying to make sure their proxy wars are fought by proxies. If Iran and the US start shooting at each other, the Hormuz Strait will clog up, immediately halting all oil tanker traffic. And what was so easy fifty years ago — toppling elected governments in Latin America — is not so easy now, Brazil excepted. This is no charade being manipulated by the NWO wizard behind the curtain. This is naked US stupidity being checked by up and coming powers, not The World Government.
The Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek) Roman Empires never got over silly cultural and religious differences, and never unified in ways that might have prevented or at least delayed the creeping, internal rot that made both of them self-delusional laughingstocks to various “barbarian” armies. And hypothetically unified, they never could have been a World Empire. There been such a thing as a World Empire (or a Satan), and we’re no closer to seeing one now. Sure, various factions of psychopathic plutocrats, or even one of them, can kill large numbers of their fellow citizens, and citizens of small, non-nuclear armed countries, with impunity, but they are not unified, and less so every day.
The elephant in the room is class, not tradition and religion. Liberality and illiberality are words that describe one’s attitudes and behaviors towards The Other, and classes less privileged than their own.
The wealthy elite 1% ers are illiberal people who are pushing class based personal agendas, conservative agendas. Their alliances often change, as do their divide and rule tactics, but no single cabal has ever “ruled the world”. All have failed at this idiotic goal. And there is no correlation between obscene wealth and intelligence, but the too wealthy are being given a free pass by those who rant about tradition and religion and gender ID instead of ranting about class.
And Serbian girl, you need to get out more. I am middle class, but I am not attached to “my” native county. I don’t even live there, nothing about it is “mine”, and its illiberal traditions are loathsome to me. (There are millions of outstanding, white-nationalist, tradition respectin’ Christians in Texas. You might have an affinity for them, but I don’t.). I am also an atheist, not a religious person, so I cannot possibly be a Satan worshipping mason. That’s as respectful a response I can present to you.
It’s important to remember that Ernst Röhm was a major leader of the Socialist wing of the National Socialist Party.His death pretty much destroyed that wing of the party.Hitler had known for a long time Röhm was homosexual,and several of his aides were as well.When Hitler decided to crush the Socialist wing in his party he used Röhm’s homosexuality as an added excuse.
Noted. He was in the socialist wing of the Nazi Party, but still an illiberal Nazi. I am certain the slightly longer living capitalist wing of the Nazi Party was not 100% hetero, but so many of them are dead and we’ll never know.
J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn were vicious in their persecuting of gays in the US, but their politics were extreme right-wing.
I believe, but I’m not certain, that chicken-hawk Lindsey Graham (R) South Carolina is gay, If he is he will never admit it because his politics are on the extreme right-wing end of the US’ spectrum.
Achilles too? Pederasty in ancient Greece did not necessarily mean homosexuality, but who knows.
My point is that political preferences don’t determine sexual preferences, and which aren’t worth so much time, fear and loathing in the political arena. Who cares? Right-wingers care, especially gay right-wingers.
I remember how furious my Rock Hudson (the actor) infatuated mother became when he died of AIDS. My ultra-conservative mother wasn’t upset about his death, she seethed about finding out he was gay. Silly fascist woman. Her hatred for gays sometimes made her tremble; maybe she is or was a pent-up lesbian.
By the way, I do deny the existence of Satan, but “The Master and Margarita” still makes me laugh, years after I read it. (It’s fiction… no cognitive dissonance there!)
One of Zuesse’s best.
Concise.
Makes sense.
We are screwed.
Katherine
My observation has been that Billionaires love countries and strategies that will make them money and hate those that will lose them money. During the Soviet period, much of the inherent wealth and resources of Eurasia were inaccessible to international capital interests. This impediment was removed in the 1990s. However, the loss of the USSR was not enough. An actual breakup of the Russian Federation itself was demanded. This was blocked in Chechnya by President Yeltsin and later by President Putin. President Putin became the “Devil” of the West apparently largely due to his struggle with and exile of Khodorkovsky. The strategy since that time appears to me to be primarily aimed at the removal and replacement of President Putin, not nuclear war with Russia. None of this has anything in particular to do with American political parties.
In any case, a second factor arose from the loss of the USSR. That is, the strategic interests of the State of Israel. The Soviet Union was allied with several states which were considered hostile to Israel especially the Baathist states of Syria and Iraq. Following the loss of the USSR, the US foreign policy intelligentsia quickly switched from an ant-Soviet position to an anti-Islamic one. Several states became targets as per the “seven countries in five years” memo revealed by Wesley Clarke. This program had nothing to do with the interests of the United States or of the billionaires (except Jewish billionaires). At one time, for example during the 1980s it was actually considered in the foreign policy interests of the US to maintain good relations with the Arab states not to destroy them.
So I think it’s a bit of an oversimplification to simply state that “Democratic” billionaires hate Russia and “Republican” billionaires hate Iran (don’t forget Venezuela, North Korea and China as well).
This column makes no sense. The Koch brothers are libertarian and many of their main points are at odds with traditional conservatives and Republicans.
If you look at any community, you will notice that the wealthier people are, the more they “free” themselves from traditional norms and values. The poor Jews were conservative, the wealthy carved out a much more “liberal” and far less strict observance for themselves. If you go to Syria or Turkey or Iran, the rural poor vote conservative. In Mexico, it is the poorest (Indians) who are the most devout Catholics (supposedly oppressed and brainwashed with religion by the ruling classes and their missionaries), whereas the ruling classes celebrate the pre-Columbian idyll and are critical of the church, past exploitation, and favorable to social progress, equality, socialist paradise murals, etc. If you go travelling anywhere, and leave the beaten path, you will meet very conservative people. You never have to fear theft of your belongings, because they don’t steal. Period. Syrian Girl has already made this point below.
The only aspect which is true of your view, is that plutocrats (who are indeed in control) are inherently invested in the status quo and will not favor changing arrangements to how property and income is distributed. But they also have no important geo-political aims (other than investments abroad and resource stripping), other than completely particular and peculiar measures to keep the military-industrial complex (or their share of it) running at maximum performance.
The idea that America wanted to “get” Syria because they were an ally of Russia also makes little sense. Before the Syrian state was almost extinguished, the Russians had (for decades) almost no influence in the Middle East or Syria, and US interference only served to increase Russian influence 100 fold. They weren’t even a fleck on the horizon of American calculations before they decided to defend Syria & Assad. The Americans have been trying to “fix” governments in the Middle East (Syria, Iraq, Iran) since the early fifties, really since the end of WW2. People also underestimate the degree to which Russian views are influenced by (among others) two things: (0) No, not geopolitical revanchism; (2) Fear of Islamist/Jihadi contamination in Muslim populations in Russia and on its borders; (3) Solidarity with Orthodox Christian communities which were the cradles for Russian Orthoxody (and Western Christianity as well).
So what controls American foreign policy ambitions abroad? Number one is Israel, which has been actively promoting (and saying so) continuous war and degradation in Syria, the more mayhem and death, the better. Israel also fears Iran. Other than the Israel factor, American seems hell-bent on destroying secular progressive socialist Arab (and other) regimes (who were often Soviet “clients” in the past) and promoting “conservative” (not traditional) Islamic extremism and dictatorial regimes. Ever since (George) Washington feared the example Haïti might give (slaves starting their own country), America has patrolled the world to make it safe for the narrow interests of America’s wealthy. There is also the doctrine that the US has to play the boss over the supply of energy in the world, to keep its position as the world’s leader.
The case that this is all about Pipelinistan is weak. It would mean Syria was so beholden to Russian interests even prior to 2011 that they could see no advantage to a pipeline feeding Mediterranean ports and the West. There are numerous pipeline ideas, not only for Saudi hydro-carbons via Syria, but also for Iranian (ally!) and Qatari gas via Iraq/Syria. Qatar benefits with either of those pipelines, as does Syria. And why would it be disastrous for the West to consume Iranian or Qatari gas one way or the other, unless Iran as enemy was the initial jumping off point? And are the Qatari and Saudi sinking treasure and political capital in strife in Syria and Iraq just for an unrealized pipeline dream? Or for irrational reasons tied to promoting their own affinities?
In the end, most of the foreign policy initiatives (Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen) by the US are not even aligned very well with American interests, nor are they very successful. We must fear the fact that policy is set mainly by a narrow class of people who have little grasp of the real world and are ensconced in their own stubborn and narrow ideological bubbles, not Realpolitik, as they blunder their way between crises and priorities of their own making. In the end, the defense of Kuwait or the Iraqi war against Iran achieved nothing of permanent advantage to the USA, nor did the entire Indo-China adventure. It is cynical and evil manipulation, but more tilting at windmills than exercising effective self-interest.
Blundering and more blundering about ideological symbols: Think how far American influence would extend if they had supported the Sandinistas and given the top 10% of the students a scholarship to study Stateside. Or if they had decided to buy up the Afghan’s entire poppy production (and mold the civil administration) at a fraction of the price it costs to drop MOABs and organize multi million dollar convoys to get diesel for generators to run air-conditioning in tents (!) out in far flung roadless mountain ranges in central Asia. This is not enlightened self-interest at work.
I agree with all you say, but I do doubt that the USA has any use for Nicaragua, or Afghanistan or any other ‘Third World’ country but as a supplier of cheap commodities and of educated technocrats to work in US industry. And, in the end, the Western elites, led by the USA, see the world’s billions of ‘useless eaters’ as a threat to be eliminated, one way or another. The planet cannot bear raising their living standards to any decent level, so they will just have to go.
I agree with Eric Zuesse that wealth – but more precisely power – is the driving force behind politics, and that as he argues it runs across political divide. The warning of history is the pursuit of power (manifested as interest) eventually leads every nation/civilization to the war it is trying to avoid: abject defeat. Power has been present in every conflict of the past – no exception. It is the underlying motivation for war. Other cultural factors might change, but not power. We do not see it, the destructive nihilistic cycle of history – round and around again – bringing us towards yet another world war, Armageddon, to use an apt biblical description.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
The manic pursuit of ‘wealth’, driven by insatiable greed, is a symptom, not the root disease. That is human psychopathology, also manifested in hatred of others, giant egotism, unscrupulousness etc. Capitalism, and neoliberal capitalism in particular, favours and promotes psychopaths.
”Furthermore, ’The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.’ Consequently, the public’s desires are actually ignored by the American Government.”
Well, yes and no. Of course the ruling castes of hideously vile and ugly societies such as the US cannot be expected to harbour any respect, let alone love and compassion, for their compatriots, however Exceptional and Indispensable the latter imagine themselves to be. But the reverse is not the case. We have heard the 100% unfounded assertions to the effect that private firearms en masse and the fabulous ’constitution-this-amendment-that’ garbage are what keeps the rich and powerful in the US in check. This is wrong for all of the following reasons at once:
a) The preferences of the ’poor little average American’ are in full sync with the ’poor little average American’:s tiny cabal of ruling plutocrats. Total contempt, hatred, and disgust of the world’s overwhelming majority (countries, peoples, and governments) which props up the wasteful, decadent US lifestyle.
b) In view of (a) and given the history of the US, the US Government knows full well that it has nothing whatsoever to fear from the moronic US population. Violently insane all right, but absolutely void of any morale, sense of decency and justice. Ready to kill for anything but revolution unless it’s a genuinely fascist one, like the Maidan in Kiev.
c) Whatever the impact of the ’poor little average American’ upon the US Government’s actions and decisions, it works in favour of the latter. Imperialist privilege functions very well indeed when it comes to fostering social cohesion.
Yes, the American regime is a murderous, criminal entity with deceptions of its own moral righteousness as the Land of the Free.
But it is only a reflection of the murderous, criminal, and deceptively self-righteous American people themselves.
In general, Americans have a fanatical religious belief in their nationalist ideology of freedom and democracy and that piece of toilet paper that is called the US Constitution.
But these US national “ideals” are only US national propaganda … since 1776.
After all, the America Empire was founded as a Anglo colonizer state, spawned by the British Empire, and built upon the extermination of Native Indians and the enslavement of Africans.
To disguise their bloodthirsty nature, Americans instinctively demonize other nations and people, whom they consider the untermenschen.
Indeed, Americanism and Zionism are virtually blood kin in this sense.
The Zionists believe that Jews are God’s chosen people.
The Americans similarly believe that they are God’s chosen (snicker) “democracy.”
Both believe that they have a God-given right to rule the world and slaughter anyone that stands in the way of their American New World Order.
Majority Of U.S. Citizens Would Approve Preventive Nuclear Strike On North Korea
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/06/majority-of-us-citizens-would-approve-preventive-nuclear-strike-on-north-korea.html
I don’t believe there is a civil war or that they are fighting each other (at least not over the larger issues). Its fake wrestling to give the appearance the country is still a Democracy. Look closely and you will see nothing changes no matter which party is in charge. Handouts and benefits for the wealthy and Big X (one or more of Pharma, Agra, Finance, Telecom, Tech, Oil, etc), a bigger military , especially post 2001, aggression towards countries that don’t kneel to USA supremacy, and a big flat nothing to the bottom 90% at best, or a fat pipe up the yahoo.
Sure the tone and flavor differs, especially on non consequential issues, but as Nader said many years ago, its the difference between coke and Pepsi.
There was a civil war among the elites. That took place between 63-74. That spilled a lot of blood. Neoliberal Globalists vs Constitutional Nationalists. The good guys lost. The winners have formulated a mixed bag of Communism and Fascism. Basically we are todays China w/o the homogeneity of the population and the illusion of Constitutional Democracy. Like the US the elite control the wealth, economy , government and media and thus the people. Same-same.
In fact I believe Russia and China are part of the fake wrestling circuit as well and have been since the early 90’s, perhaps even early 80’s. Conflict with the US help them control their populations which also suffer great wealth inequality. Both have signed on to the NWO. Its just people are not ready to know One World Government is here. Still have some details needed to be worked out before its announced and perhaps some more conditioning in the form of disasters is required to force a terrorized and weary population into acceptance .
Billionaires: Playing god but not good enough to do it well
Nice article, clear and to the point. “Somethings happening here, what it is, is becoming clear …”
As to the future of US, at what point do a majority of boiling frogs, realize it is over ? When they see a few of their friend frogs floating lifeless in the pot.
Dems were appeased by the promise of Mueller Report and Reps were appeased by a psyop Q, those appeasements fully popped, and BOTH are staring at the pot of boiling water.
Billionaires will increase censorship of the internet, and Assange with be given bad water, a 40 degree F cell, and bad food, until his body gives out.
Once dialog has been terminated…history tells us happens next.