“Where we get concerned with China is where it is not necessarily abiding by international norms and rules and is using its sheer size and muscle to force countries into subordinate positions,” said US president Barack Obama in Jamaica on Thursday.
What is it they say about people living in glass houses throwing rocks?
A quick analysis of Obama’s criteria seems in order.
It is much easier to rule over those people who have lost all their dignity.
There is no reason to fear resistance where cynical consumerism, lack of knowledge, and constant anxiety are shaping the behavioral patterns of a nation; of most of its citizens.
As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting points out, until a video surfaced of South Carolina policeman Michael Slager murdering Walter Scott, the media was reporting a package of lies manufactured by the police: a fight that never occurred, witnesses who didn’t exist, the victim taking the policeman’s taser, etc. The lies collapsed because the video appeared.
… and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
— Isaiah 2:3-4
As usual, western media are deliberately confusing in communicating on the latest Mid-East conflict which eventually led to the recent atrocious bombing of Yemen by the US-directed Saudi alliance, including Qatar and other Gulf monarchies. They are proxies, to be sure, for their Washington masters. My heart is bleeding for Yemen, a country of warm and generous people I got to know well, working with them in the 1990s and early 2000s.
“They” in my title refers to the major players in our food system. First is Big Ag—Monsanto and Dow being prominent—and those industrial farms that use Big Ag’s products. Second are large food corporations—General Mills and the like—who churn out processed foods and store their goods in warehouses before moving them to market. Third are those who breed and raise the livestock we eat. Fourth are those who import food from overseas.
It has just been announced that, starting April 20, U.S. troops will start training troops of Ukraine’s Azov Battalion.
The American public seems not to clearly recognize that since “troops on the ground” went out of fashion, its government has devoted itself to arming terrorists and tyrants to do its bidding by proxy. This is no accident.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing right in the Middle East these days. There seems to be no hope left, and no fervor. All that was pure was dragged through filth. All that was great here was stolen or smashed by the outsiders. Enthusiasm had been ridiculed, then drowned, or burned to ashes, or shattered by tanks and missiles.
Corruption thrives – corruption that inundated this entire region since the early days of Western colonialism, and then was sustained through the present-day imperialist global regime.
