You cannot put lipstick on a pig and make it pretty

By Martin Love

NORTH CAROLINA - It is obvious.  Piggish American imperialistic foreign policy under Trump aims to overthrow uncooperative foreign governments and install subservient regimes, often to make way for the plundering of natural resources and to open markets for U.S. corporations, particularly arms makers.

John Bolton declared clearly why the U.S. is going for regime change in Venezuela: OIL. The Trump regime uses every means at its disposal, particularly economic ones, and even if in outrage a country has halted diplomatic relations with the U.S., as Iran has fairly done for decades, that in itself is cause for some kind of attack. The Trump regime is also now threatening European countries over the erection of the SPV for trade with Iran, a move that one would hope thoroughly alienates European governments.

What is happening right now in Venezuela has been in the works, carefully coordinated and planned, for a long time. It’s quite remarkable that while the U.S. has been trying to choke and destroy Nicolas Maduro, as it tried to choke Chavez, stealing billions in dollars and gold and impoverishing many, it has the gall, via a blustering Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to offer $20 million this month in “humanitarian assistance” to Venezuela at the same time.
 That current offer is exactly equivalent in a hospital to taking away every painkiller, every medicine, perhaps even bed linens And food, from an ill patient, and handing that patient a single band aid. What’s a mere $20 million in chump change to a country that can conger fiat dollars at no cost whatsoever?

And those countries, including European ones, that aver from kowtowing to the Trump administration become alleged threats to U.S. “national security”, a phrase that has lost specific definition aside from implying that some government elsewhere merely sees things differently than Washington does and is thus deemed a “threat”.

 Many countries, many European ones, many in Latin America, even Canada now and some in East Asia like Australia, have become mere slaves to the “empire”, slaves to U.S. hegemonic pretensions, and all the while the U.S. government has the gall to designate itself the leader of the “free world” which in fact is a world that in many lands has mostly relinquished sovereignty because of U.S. threats real or implied.

It is not just foreigners, including Iran and its people, who have been under some kind of onerous attack. So have many Americans, too, by their own government.

Trump, for example, shut down segments of the U.S. government, depriving almost a million federal workers of salaries for over a month, while demanding billions of dollars for a wall (like Israel’s wall snaking through the West Bank) along the border with Mexico to keep out Latinos looking for a better life and this largely because the U.S. literally has made life difficult for them in their home countries, which has including propping up right wing governments that also have become slaves to U.S. imperium while the U.S. offers personal benefits to their narrow claques of “leaders”.

 No doubt it would seem to the U.S.-designated “president” of Venezuela Juan Guaido (who was never elected in a country that former U.S President Jimmy Carter says has the fairest electoral system anywhere) that he has “benefitted”, because otherwise he is of such little merit that this political wanker would otherwise be a perennial non-entity.

And internally, Trump has minimal relative popularity now along with the U.S. Congress where the very first piece of legislation under consideration in the U.S. Senate in this new session post midterm elections has nada to do with aiding the American people, but rather with breaching the U.S. Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the long cherished right to free speech by making it a crime, with punishments, to support efforts, even with speech, championing the basic human rights of Palestinians -- all at the behest of arguably the most criminal country on earth, Likud Israel. If this weren’t happening, it would be unbelievable that it ever could happen.

Simply put, the U.S. government has drifted towards becoming a bare-faced fascist enterprise, one not much better than what Nazi Germany was if one can be so bold to speak the truth.

But also consider that the U.S. government has become a virtual slave itself, and to whom is important. With regard to foreign policy in the Middle East, it has become a slave to the Zionists and oligarchic Zionist American billionaires who have literally purchased influence in Washington from politicians whose primary concern is staying in office and having the financial wherewithal to do so. Israel is preparing in time to annex the West Bank, all of it, and moreover, it is demanding -- and has support among some members of the U.S. Congress for the full and permanent annexation of the Syrian Golan.

 This alone breaches many covenants of international law, the very “rules-based order” the U.S. claims to have tried to maintain. But the extant alleged “rules” apparently are not “rules” at all, because rules imply something fixed and well honored. The “rules” seem now to have no meaning because they can be modified whimsically to suit the illegal, in this case Israeli, demands of the moment.

What is interesting, and maybe particularly for Iranians, is that some of the very bravest U.S. politicians now happen to be female Muslims elected in November to the U.S. Congress for the first time. Democrats Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who along with non-Muslim Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, are not shy about speaking truth, as they see it, to power. And despite the fact that they are under some attack themselves for doing so on both sides of the aisle in Congress, they are opening up heretofore unrealized domains of discourse on many important issues in Washington and beyond, and not just on the matter of destructive U.S. foreign policies.

But even more importantly, among the American people, if not among the long-entrenched politicians, they are gaining some traction and admiration from Americans generally for their bravery. On that note there is reason for some optimism, however faint, in an ambience that would shock even British writer George Orwell, who long ago imagined a future totalitarian world bereft of individual freedoms.