Last month, Donald’s Trump choice to head the CIA, Mike Pompeo, dedicated much of his first speech toward a hysterical and disturbing rant against Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange (I covered this in detail in the post: The American Empire Under Donald Trump Has Become Increasingly Desperate, Dangerous & Insecure).
There is no reason for the Democratic Party to exist.
– Jimmy Dore
I’ve been surprised by the number of people who lived in total denial about who Barack Obama actually was throughout his entire administration, suddenly pointing out the ethical and demoralizing implications of his recent decision to accept $400,000 for a speech to Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.
Reporters without Borders just published its annual World Press Freedom Index rankings, and the results for both the U.S. and UK are not impressive. Both countries declined two spots from last year, with the UK at 41, and the greatest and most free nation on earth, America, down to 43.
Here’s The Guardian reporting on the UK’s decline:
So we tried that thing called regime change in Iraq, and failed miserably. We tried it in Libya, and now there are now active slave markets in the place. But we satisfied the objective of “removing a dictator”. By the exact same reasoning, a doctor would inject a patient with “moderate” cancer cells “to improve his cholesterol numbers”, and claim victory after the patient is dead, particularly if the post-mortem shows remarkable cholesterol readings. But we know that doctors don’t do that, or, don’t do it in such a crude format, and that there is a clear reason for it.
The last thing I ever wanted to do was write about France’s likely next president, Emmanuel Macron, but here we are. This post was inspired by a very telling Financial Times article sent to me by a reader, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Most Americans paying attention to global affairs have some conception of his opponent, nationalist firebrand Marine Le Pen, but Macron is likely to be very much a black box. I hope today’s post changes that.
Last week, I wrote a post titled, What Can an Overhyped Silicon Valley Juice Company Tell Us About the U.S. Economy. Here’s how I ended the piece:
My current working hypothesis is that the U.S. is a late-stage empire about to enter a more serious and dangerous period of collapse. In case you missed it, I outlined my broad brush view in the very popular recent post, Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire. Here’s a brief excerpt:
The primary driver behind my decision to walk away from a lucrative Wall Street career was my coming to terms with the fact that our financial system is largely a rent-seeking scheme designed to enrich parasitical, unethical behavior at the expense of the nation as a whole. As soon as I recognized this, I could no longer feel proud of my work and certainly couldn’t justify my large paycheck for being a compliant, highly productive cog in this machine.
The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.
– George Orwell, 1984
Although the U.S. already has special forces operating in Somalia (of course), Mr. “America First,” Donald Trump, figured it’d be a swell idea to add some more.
Pretty much every official statement emanating from the U.S. government these days is a deception, fabrication, or outright lie. I understand that this is a hard thing for a U.S. citizen to admit, but as James Baldwin so accurately stated:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
