How the US Created the Cold War

There was a speech that the smug Harvard neoconservative Graham Allison presented at the US aristocracy’s TED Talks on 20 November 2018, and which is titled on youtube as “Is war between China and the US inevitable?” It currently has 1,217,326 views. The transcript is here. His speech said that the US must continue being the world’s #1 power, or else persuade China’s Government to cooperate more with what America’s billionaires demand. He said that the model for the US regime’s supposed goodness in international affairs is The Marshall Plan after the end of World War II. He ended his speech with the following passage as pointing the way forward, to guide US foreign policies during the present era. Here is that concluding passage:

Let me remind you of what happened right after World War II. A remarkable group of Americans and Europeans and others, not just from government, but from the world of culture and business, engaged in a collective surge of imagination. And what they imagined and what they created was a new international order, the order that’s allowed you and me to live our lives, all of our lives, without great power war and with more prosperity than was ever seen before on the planet. So, a remarkable story. Interestingly, every pillar of this project that produced these results, when first proposed, was rejected by the foreign policy establishment as naive or unrealistic.

My favorite is the Marshall Plan. After World War II, Americans felt exhausted. They had demobilized 10 million troops, they were focused on an urgent domestic agenda. But as people began to appreciate how devastated Europe was and how aggressive Soviet communism was, Americans eventually decided to tax themselves a percent and a half of GDP every year for four years and send that money to Europe to help reconstruct these countries, including Germany and Italy, whose troops had just been killing Americans. Amazing. This also created the United Nations. Amazing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The World Bank. NATO. All of these elements of an order for peace and prosperity. So, in a word, what we need to do is do it again.

The US did donate many billions of dollars to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan, however, excluded the Soviet Union. It excluded Belarus, which had suffered the largest losses of any nation in WWII, 25% of its population. It excluded Russia, which lost 13%. But those weren’t nations, they were states within the USSR, the nation that lost by far the highest percentage of its population of any nation, to the war: nearly 14%.

Russia had lost, to Germany’s Nazis, 13,950,000, or exactly 12.7% of its population. Another part of the Soviet Union, Belarus, lost 2.29 million, or exactly 25.3% of its population to Hitler. Another part of the USSR, Ukraine, lost 6.85 million, or 16.3%. The entire Soviet Union lost 26.6 million, exactly 13.7% of its population to Hitler. The US lost only 419,400, or 0.32% of its population.Furthermore, immediately after FDR died and Harry S. Truman became President, the US CIA (then as its predecessor organization the OSS) provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. So: while the USSR was killing any ‘ex’-Nazis it could find, the USA. was hiring them either in West Germany or else into the US itself. It brought them to America whenever the US regime needed the person’s assistance in designing weapons to use against the USSR Right away, the US was looking for ‘ex’-Nazis who could help the US conquer the Soviet Union. The Cold War secretly started in the US as soon as WW II was over (the OSS-CIA’s “Operation Paperclip”). (There was no equivalent to “Operation Paperclip” in the USSR.)

The Soviet Union suffered vastly the brunt of the Allies’ losses from WWII, but the US, which suffered the least from the war, refused to help them out, and instead the US regime protected most of the ‘ex’-Nazis that were in its own area of control. Without nasty Joseph Stalin’s help, America would today be ruled by the Nazi regime instead of by America’s domestic aristocracy as it now is. And this is the way that our aristocracy thanked the Soviet people, for the immense sacrifices that they had made, really, on behalf of the entire future world. This happened right after WW II was over, and the US regime was already determined, right away, not to help those people, but instead to conquer them — to treat them as being the new enemy, so as to stoke the weapons-trade after the war (and the need for more weapons) ended. How ‘good’ was this behavior by the US rulers — the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC — actually? (The MIC took over as soon as FDR died and Truman replaced him.)

Truman was unfortunately an extremely effective agent of America’s billionaires in advancing them first to continue their MIC (or, actually, the weapons-making firms), so that the billionaires who controlled them had no reason to fear the breakout of peace in the post-war era — America right away started its world-record-shattering number of coups and invasions, virtually as soon as Truman took over. First was the coup in Thailand in 1948 — right at the CIA’s very start — in order to grab hold of Asia’s narcotics traffic so that the needed off-the-books funding for that spy-agency could be instituted (and its existence didn’t become public until the great investigative journalist Gary Webb uncovered its operations in Nicaragua during President Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, which entailed illegal funding — from cocaine-sales — of Reagan’s war against Nicaragua, a Soviet-friendly country) The heroic Gary Webb became blackballed from America’s ’news’-(actually propaganda)-media and plunged into poverty so that he (according to the government) committed suicide and “wasn’t murdered,” but (either way) his death was another of the CIA’s secret victories.

Hey, if this looks bad for the United States, then the truth looks bad. This is notthe propaganda. Deceits such as Graham Allison’s slick distortions are the propaganda — and thus he and the others who do such work are enormously successful and highly honored by America’s billionaires and the rest of their retinues. People such as that, train the next generation of and for America’s aristocracy, so that they can become just as smug in their evil and self-deception as their trainers are. Their parents get vindicated by Allison and others of the billionaire-class’s propaganda-merchants (‘historians’ ‘journalists’, etc.). What’s not to like in this? It’s virtually a cult of the world’s most-powerful people and of their retinues. Lots of people would like to join it — and, “To hell with the truth.”

Even the U.N. has caved to the American behemoth. It offers an article “UN/DESA POLICY BRIEF #52: THE MARSHALL PLAN, IMF AND FIRST UN DEVELOPMENT DECADE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM: LESSONS FOR OUR TIME”, eulogizing what maybe its authors didn’t know was actually the very start of the Cold War:

Three events from the Golden Age that left significant lessons relevant for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals include: the contributions of the Marshall Plan, the experience leading to the achievement of current account convertibility under the IMF Articles of Agreement and the declaration of the First UN Development Decade. The Marshall Plan marked the very beginning of successful international cooperation in the post-war period.

No mention is made, there, either, that this was the start of the Cold War. The fact that this was the start of America’s war against Russia is simply ignored. Instead, all of this is celebrated. But even the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia acknowledges, in its (heavily propagandistic pro-US-regime) article “Molotov Plan”:

The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union in 1947 in order to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. It can be seen to be the Soviet Union’s version of the Marshall Plan, which for political reasons the Eastern European countries would not be able to join without leaving the Soviet sphere of influence. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov rejected the Marshall Plan (1947), proposing instead the Molotov Plan — the Soviet-sponsored economic grouping which was eventually expanded to become the Comecon.[1]

Just think about that, for a moment: The Soviet Union is being blamed there because it “rejected” the US regime’s demand upon all nations that accepted aid from The Marshall Plan, that they be “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence.” How stupid does the writer of that particular passage have to be? Wikipedia’s description of the Molotov Plan continues:

The Molotov Plan was symbolic of the Soviet Union’s refusal to accept aid from the Marshall Plan, or allow any of their satellite states to do so because of their belief that the Marshall Plan was an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states through the conditions imposed and by making beneficiary countries economically dependent on the United States (Officially, one of the goals of the Marshall Plan was to prevent the spread of Communism).

The Marshall Plan wasn’t merely “an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states” but was instead an actual lure, to draw into “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence,” the nations “that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union.” This wasn’t really about “Soviet interest in their satellite states” but instead it was about the US regime’s policy, immediately after WW II, to take over not merely the nations that the US had helped in Europe to defeat Hitler, but also the nations that the Soviet Union had helped to defeat Hitler. It was, in short, a US grab, to control territory within the lands that the Soviet Union had saved from Nazism. This is the reality.

Look at these tables, again, of how much the US and the Soviet Union — and all other countries — had suffered losses from actually fighting against Hitler, and then consider that the nation which had lost the least was now so war-mongering as to immediately try to grab “sphere of influence” — the very border-nations which were crucial to the Soviet Union’s national security against that very same grabber — grabbing away from the one that had lost the most.

Here is another piece of US-regime propaganda about the Molotov Plan (which they say was the Soviet response to The Marshall Plan even though it wasn’t and the Soviet Union had been so destroyed by Hitler as to have made any such donations to their own satellites only minuscule by comparison):

The plan was a system of bilateral trade agreements that established COMECON to create an economic alliance of socialist countries. This aid allowed countries in Europe to stop relying on American aid, and therefore allowed Molotov Plan states to reorganize their trade to the USSR instead. The plan was in some ways contradictory, however, because at the same time the Soviets were giving aid to Eastern bloc countries, they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR.

Those weren’t “socialist” countries; they were dictatorial socialist countries, as opposed to democratic socialist countries such as in Scandinavia — the proper term for what the Soviet alliance was is “communist,” not “socialist” — and there was a very big difference between the Scandinavian countries, versus the communist countries (though the US regime wants to slur one by the other so as to sucker fools against democratic socialism — progressivism).

And, by “they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR,” we’re supposed to think that Germany, and Italy, and Japan, shouldn’t have compensated their victims? What? And yet we’re also supposed to believe that Germany should pay it for Jews who lived in Israel? What’s that about? Why? Why ‘should’ Germany be funding Jews to grab land that for thousands of years has been populated almost entirely by Arabs and for perhaps a thousand years almost entirely by Muslims, thus subsidizing the theft of that land, the grabbing of that land, by Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Holocaust? What is all of this really about, and what is propaganda such as Graham Allison delivers, really about? America’s manufacturers of the machinery of mass-death need to “make a living,” don’t they? And isn’t that propaganda the most effective way to do it? So, that’s what it really is about.

There is the presumption by neoconservatives — American imperialists — that the US Government is both democratic and well-intentioned, but at least after the death of FDR, it hasn’t been either one. (Back in his time, it was a limited democracy, very limited for Blacks.) And this is the reason why the US regime double-crossed Russia and shamed The West when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, ended communism and ended the USSR and even ended its Warsaw Pact in 1991, but the US side secretly continued the Cold War, and does so increasingly today.

None of this fits the US regime’s propaganda-narrative, such as Graham Allison, and many other thousands of other regime-shills, present. Theirs is called ‘history’. The reality is called “history.” In the US and its vassal-nations, there is vastly more of a market for ‘history’ than for “history,” because the billionaires not only control the government — they also control the alleged news-media, history-publishers, and other means of ‘informing’ and ‘educating’ the public. So, it’s a self-selecting circle of deceivers that are at the top.

PS: To get to the beginning of the Cold War, Truman’s complete diary needs to be published. The excerpts that have been published do include information that contradicts and overrides his published statements, and that thereby helps researchers penetrate to what was really going on in his head at the time. What they show is a tragically unintelligent but well-intentioned person, who had some guiding prejudices and therefore thought in labels instead of trying actually to understand the other person’s real problems (such as FDR did). For example, at the Potsdam Conference during 17 July to 2 August 1945, Stalin tried to explain why the Soviet Union needed to be surrounded by friendly countries just as much as the US and Britain did, but neither Truman nor Churchill would accept any such concern by Stalin. As the BBC summarizedthat, “Stalin wanted a buffer zone of friendly Communist countries to protect the USSR from further attack in the future.” Truman got his views on such matters from his top generals and other advisors. His diary on 16 July 1945 said“Talked to Mc Caffery about France. He is scared stiff of Communism, the Russian society which isn’t communism at all but just police government pure and simple. A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.” But Stalin actually had lots of reason to distrust both Truman and Churchill — just as they had lots of reason to distrust him. FDR hadn’t been so totally in thrall of his generals, nor as naive — nor as manipulable. Just a day after that entry on July 16th, came this on July 17th: “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell.”

The problem isn’t that Truman often misunderstood, but that he surrounded himself with people that his Party’s top donors liked. Truman wanted to be a progressive but ended up being only a liberal — which his Party’s wealthiest found to be acceptable. His main achievements were in foreign policy and amounted to leading Churchill’s Cold War, pretty much as Stalin had expected. For example, at Potsdam, as Steve Neal’s 2002 Harry and Ike says (p. 40), “Truman was elated that Stalin was preparing to join the Allies in the war against Japan. [But] Eisenhower advised [Truman against that, because, Ike said,] ‘no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.’” So, Truman rejected the overwhelming opposition from the scientists, who favored doing only a public test-demonstration for Japan’s leaders, and nuked both Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in order to keep the Soviets out of Japan, not in order to win the war against Japan. (Then, of course, the very tactful Ike became Truman’s successor, and led for what at the end of his Presidency he famously named the “military industrial complex.”)

So: those bomb-drops were part of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, not really for the hot WW II to beat Japan. However, Truman could also have deceived himself about what his motives actually were, because his diary on 25 July 1945 said: “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new.” The two bombings occurred on 6 and 9 August — right after Potsdam. Obviously, it wasn’t just “soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” And, never, after he perpetrated that, did he express regret about all those “women and children.” He had no difficulty ignoring embarrassing realities.

Truman’s intentions were progressive — for example, his diary-entry on 16 July 1945 said (in the context of damning the Soviet Government) “It seems that Sweden, Norway, Denmark and perhaps Switzerland have the only real peoples government on the Continent of Europe. But the rest are as bad lot from the standpoint of the people who do not believe in tyrany.” (He routinely misspelled like that.) Unlike Republicans, who love to equate “socialism” with communism and simply to ignore the Scandinavian examples disproving that equation, he wasn’t quite stupid enough to fall for the billionaires’ line on it. He didn’t need to be: he was a Democrat. Even the billionaires in his Party don’t spout that line — it’s strictly Republicans who equate “socialism” with “communism.”

FDR was a leader. Truman didn’t know how to lead, because he didn’t even know himself. Himself was a puppet, and he didn’t even know it, much less know the strings (from Ike etc. — the billionaires’ knowing agents) (which were pulling his own brain).

And that’s how the road to today started.

And 200 years from now is, by now, virtually certain to be vastly worse. If persons of FDR’s calibre had been America’s Presidents after his death, then none of this would likely have happened (at least not nearly as much); but none of them were. Leadership matters. It really does. It really did.

Eric ZUESSE

American writer and investigative historian

How the U.S. Regime Uses Sanctions to Soften a Country Up for Invasion

by Eric Zuesse

The Wall Street Journal headlined on May 27th, “Iran’s Crude Buyers Jump Ship” and reported that “the country’s direct crude buyers have all but vanished, traders and executives in the Islamic Republic say. … China, India, Turkey, South Korea and Japan have ended all direct purchases of Iranian crude and condensates, they said.” Those buyers had “bought up to 1.6 million barrels a day of Iranian crude in March combined.” In China’s case, the decision to comply with Trump’s sanctions had not yet been known, until “When a Chinese-owned tanker loaded in Kharg in mid-May, it was widely interpreted as a resumption of Beijing’s crude purchases. But the tanker subsequently gave Indonesia as its destination,” and this indicated that the largest importer of oil from Iran, China, is now complying with the U.S. demand to stop trading with Iran. Now that Trump has cancelled all waivers, these countries have added themselves to the list of those which were already complying with the U.S. demand to stop importing Iranian oil. Furthermore, “Chinese companies are no longer buying Iranian crude, businessmen in Tehran say.” The U.S. and Saudi Arabia intend to be selling most of the oil that Iran previously had been selling but now is blocked from selling; so, at the same time as Iran gets strangulated by Trump’s sanctions, America and its chief ally, the Sauds, become further enriched by these sanctions.

The American people seem to be overwhelmingly supporting President Trump’s efforts to strangle Iran. On May 24th, The Hill  bannered “Sanders refuses to apologize for opposing war with Iran”, and the reader-comments there were mostly lukewarm-to-hostile toward Sanders. However, some of the others expressed puzzlement, such as the one that received the most up-votes, “Apologize for not wanting to go to war? What???” Some other commenters explained “What???” such as by saying: “Still wouldn’t want him as president. Not after he voted AGAINST russia sanctions.” That person clearly supports America’s imposing sanctions against countries that never attacked America. Many people are plainly suspicious of any candidate who rejects neoconservatism (U.S. imperialism, regime-change invasions, etc. — U.S. aggressiveness) and they think the person to be weak. The neoconservative Joseph Biden is probably benefiting more from his having supported neoconservatism, against Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., than Sanders is benefiting from having opposed those invasions. In U.S. politics, the record shows that there is no gain to be won by opposing U.S. aggression. Sanctions are economic aggression: they are the first step toward an outright invasion. Between the sanctions and the invasions comes a crescendo of propaganda in order to whip up ‘patriotism’. It happened with Iraq. It happened with Syria. It happened with Nicaragua. And it could happen with Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, and/or North Korea.

The U.S. doesn’t follow its Constitution anymore. The Constitution says that the President cannot go to war unless and until the Congress authorizes that by declaring war (which isn’t defined in the Constitution), and “The last time the United States formally declared war, using specific terminology, on any nation was in 1942”, so that all of the roughly 125 U.S. invasions after 1945 were without any legal authorization but instead entirely at the whim of the U.S. President as the Commander-in-Chief, who actually possesses no authorization to declare war, but never do a majority of American subjects oppose that (or any other violation of the U.S. Constitution). For today’s America, Congress’s authorization for sanctions against a country is the new way that Congress declares war against a country, and this path to war requires only a 50% majority in both Houses, and it is stated in a Congressional resolution that the average American won’t recognize as being a declaration of war, though it actually is. To authorize sanctions is now to authorize invasions, coups, or any other way to finalize a regime-change operation. Sanctions are now the way they all start — they are the “Open, Sesame” to American aggression, despite the U.S. Constitution. And the American public basically don’t care.

On May 13th, Reuters headlined “Iran insists on ramping up oil sales to stay in nuclear pact” and reported that “EU officials … estimate Iran needs to sell 1.5 million bpd to keep its economy afloat. A drop below 1 million bpd could bring hardship and economic crisis.”

Prior to U.S. President Donald Trump’s cancellation of the nuclear deal with Iran and re-imposition of economic sanctions against Iran and against any companies that trade with Iran, Iran had been selling around 2 million bpd (barrels per day). So, the subtraction of “1.6 million barrels a day” would, alone, bring this down to 0.4 million bpd. It would be turning the screws so hard that the suffering of Iranians would be unbearable. But look at what Trump and a passive Congress are doing in Yemen, where the U.S. regime supplies the weaponry the training and the Saudis and UAE forces use them to slaughter as many Houthis as they can by bombing the food-supply route. Maybe just starving Iranians won’t seem to Americans to be that bad. American propaganda makes it all seem okay or even good and a necessary thing to do.

Furthermore, quoting again the May 13th article:

Once Europe’s biggest supplier, Iran has seen its exports gradually cut off from European buyers.

China – Iran’s largest oil customer with imports of 475,000 bpd in the first quarter of this year – has also stopped buying from Iran after Washington chose not to renew sanctions waivers.

That’s part of this 1.6M bpd which the WSJ more recently confirmed.

Therefore, companies both in Europe and in China are terminating trade with Iran. The likelihood is consequently that Iran will be forced back into its nuclear program, and that things will be much as they had been before Obama had struck his deal with Iran. Here’s what that situation was like:

On 22 April 2010, the Congressional Research Service reported to Congress that:

Iran’s economy is highly dependent on the production and export of crude oil to finance government spending, and consequently is vulnerable to fluctuations in international oil prices. Although Iran has vast petroleum reserves, the country lacks adequate refining capacity and imports gasoline to meet domestic energy needs. Iran is seeking foreign investment to develop its petroleum sector. While some deals have been finalized, reputational and financial risks may have limited other foreign companies’ willingness to finalize deals.

Trump seems to exceed the hostility toward Iran that Obama and Bush had displayed. If Trump is trying to force Iran to retaliate, then the goal is to use Iran’s retaliation as an excuse for the U.S. military to move in — to invade Iran.

The May 13th Reuters article says “One year after Washington quit the deal, Iran announced on Wednesday steps to relax some restrictions on its nuclear program.”

So: that is already restarting.

OilPrice dot com bannered on 22 April 2019, “Iran Threatens To Block Key Oil Chokepoint If It Can No Longer Export Crude” and reported that, “Iran will block the world’s most important chokepoint for global oil trade, the Strait of Hormuz, if Tehran is barred from using it to export its oil, Navy Rear Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), said.”

A year ago, on 13 May 2018, Dr. Arshad M. Khan had headlined at Modern Diplomacy, “The Eclipsing Iran Deal: Truth And Consequences” and stated that,

Iran commands the Strait of Hormuz and a blocked Persian Gulf could see a quadrupling or more in the price of oil, bringing the current economic and stock market boom to a crashing end. Missile attacks from Iran and its ally Hezbollah would cause havoc in Israel’s cities. Asymmetric warfare in Syria and Iraq would cost American lives.

On 5 July 2018, Britain’s Guardian headlined “Iran threatens to block Strait of Hormuz over US oil sanctions”, and reported that,

Tehran threatened to block the Gulf passageway in retaliation for Washington’s looming sanctions against Iranian oil exports – a threat the US military said would be immediately countered. … Mohammad Ali Jafari, the Guards commander, was quoted by the semi-official Tasnim news agency as saying: “We will make the enemy understand that either everyone can use the Strait of Hormuz or no one.”

Iran’s fear here is that those “looming sanctions against Iranian oil exports” will be accompanied by a U.S. military blockade in order to enforce the economic sanctions militarily, and not merely by sanctioning both Iran and any company that trades with Iran. That would then be a physical blockade in addition to the economic blockade. In a sense, it would be like what the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and UAE are doing to the residents in the Houthi area of Yemen: starving the people to death.

The Trump regime is clearly hoping for an excuse to invade Iran; and, if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, then Trump and his friend Netanyahu will have their wish, their excuse to invade that country.

Iran is being abandoned now, not only by America’s allies such as in Europe, but even in countries that had formerly been friendly toward Iran, such as China. Trump and Netanyahu are having their way. Iran is apparently trapped, by the two fascist regimes in U.S. and Israel (and not only by the Sauds, who also crave to destroy Iran).

The U.S. regime is additionally trying this strategy against Venezuela, of economically strangling the country with sanctions as a way to soften it up for a subsequent invasion. The excuse for an invasion there will probably be ‘humanitarian’, in order to stop the shortages of food, medicine and other necessities, which shortages are being caused actually by America’s economic sanctions against Venezuela and against any company that trades with Venezuela.

On May 13th, the New York Times bannered “White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War” and reported that Trump’s team had presented to the President “an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons.” The plan was not for a land-invasion but for an air-invasion: bombers and missiles.

If Russia abandons any of its allies, such as Iran and/or Venezuela, then the U.S. regime will have discredited Russia in the eyes of any remaining allied or even just friendly country, and this too could be part of Trump’s strategy — his expectation that Russia will abandon its allies if the U.S. regime invades one of Russia’s allies.

However, otherwise (in the event that Russia stands with and defends its allies), World War III seems likely.

Under Obama and escalating under Trump, there already are many U.S. sanctions against Russia; so, the start of America’s war against Russia preceded Trump, who merely continues and escalates Obama’s policies regarding Russia — policies that had (and have) overwhelming support from both Parties in both houses of Congress. All of this — against Iran, against Venezuela, and against Russia — is strongly bipartisan. It started with the Magnitsky Act in 2012, which was based on a hoax that became accepted as true and which created the first of now a string of congressionally legislated U.S. sanctions against Russia. It can’t be blamed only on a political Party but on the group of people who basically control both of America’s political Parties, which is America’s 585 billionaires — the people who decide whom their Party will nominate for the U.S. Presidency and for seats in Congress. These policies — fraud-based though all of them actually are — have no opposition from any of America’s billionaires. And here is the latest such fraud.

Those examples show how economic sanctions against a country are the first stage of war by the U.S. regime, an unofficial declaration of war against that ‘enemy’ country and the preparatory stage for a coup, or, if the coup fails to work, then for an invasion. A successful coup happening in any of those countries would be extremely unlikely. Consequently, if Trump is going to be demanding at least one victory, then at least one of those countries will probably be invaded, and Americans will be prepared for it, with intense ‘patriotism’ (though the U.S. Constitution did everything it could to prevent any of this from happening). Maybe the term for that should instead be “nationalism,” and maybe “patriotism” should apply only to people who loathe aggressors and violators of the U.S. Constitution. But, then, there would be very few American patriots around, anymore (if there ever were). Anyway, in our time, America is clearly a dictatorship; so, what the public want is irrelevant to what the rulers do. Politics is just propaganda and theater now, here.

—————

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.

‘Humanitarian’ Concerns Increase Wars, Benefit Only Arms-Producers

by Eric Zuesse

Unlike a regular corporation, the corporations that manufacture and sell weapons to their government are virtually 100% dependent upon their government and its military allies, for their own success; their markets are only those governments, not individuals (such as is the case for normal corporations). Consequently, either their government will control them, and those firms won’t have any effective control over their own markets, or else those firms will, themselves, control their government, and thereby effectively control their markets, via the government’s foreign policies — not only via expanding its military alliances (those firms’ foreign markets), but via its designating ‘enemy’ nations that it and its ‘allies’ (those arms-producers’ foreign markets) can then use those weapons against.

In countries such as the United States, arms-producers are benefiting and controlled by the country’s billionaires, instead of (as in Russia, for example) benefiting and controlled by the government. These totally profit-driven arms-producers need to have market-nations that are called ‘allied’ governments, but they also need to have some target-nations that are called ‘enemy’ governments, so as to ‘justify’ more arms-production by these firms, against which to use these weapons. Only in nations where arms-producers are privately instead of publicly controlled are the government’s foreign polices predominantly controlled by the country’s arms-producers. That’s the way it is in America.

The main ‘ally’ of the U.S. is the Saud family, who own the government of Saudi Arabia. As a recent debate-brief said, “The US has been the world’s leading exporter in weapons since 1990 and the biggest customer is Saudi Arabia. The U.S. sold a total of $55.6 billion of weapons worldwide, and in 2017, cleared $18 billion dollars with Saudi Arabia alone.” Under Trump, those sales are set to soar, because on 20 May 2017 “U.S. $350 Billion Arms-Sale to Sauds Cements U.S.-Jihadist Alliance” — notwithstanding now the slaughter in Yemen and the slaughter of Jamal Khashoggi. Yet, Trump talks up his ‘humanitarian’ concerns for the people of Venezuela as ‘justification’ for his possibly invading Venezuela, and America’s military is preparing to do that.

The main and central ‘enemy’ of the U.S. is Russia’s government; and all of the other ‘enemies’ of America (the spokes of America’s ‘enemy’ wheel) are led by people — such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Yanukovych, Bashar al-Assad, Salvador Allende, Jacobo Arbenz, and Nicolo Madura — who are friendly toward Russia. The objective here is to force other nations to join America’s anti-Russia alliances or else to face the consequences of a likely invasion or coup by America to overthrow and replace those leaders. Therefore, America targets all nations that are/were friendly toward Russia, such as pre-2003 Iraq, and such as pre-2011 Libya, and such as Syria, and such as pre-1973 Chile, and such as post-1979 Iran — all of America’s various target-nations, which are the authorized targets for America and its ‘allies’ to invade or otherwise regime-change (change from being a target, to becoming instead a new market).

In order for privately controlled arms-producers to thrive, there is just as much of a need for ‘allies’ as for ’targets’, because without targets, there can be no authorized markets, since every weapon is useless if it has no authorized target against which it may be used. There consequently needs to be at least one ‘enemy’ for any country whose arms-production is privately instead of publicly controlled. Both ‘allies’ and ‘enemies’ are needed, in order for America’s arms-makers to continue flourishing.

By contrast, in Russia, where each of the arms-producers is majority-controlled by the government instead of by private investors, each arms-producer exists only in order to defend the nation, there is no need for any ‘enemy’ nations, and the best situation for such a government is to the contrary: to have as many allies, or buyers of its country’s weapons, as possible (so that it will be as safe as possible), and as few nations as possible that are enemies. For such a country, there’s no benefit in having any enemies. America has publicly been against Russia ever since the end of World War II, and privately and secretly remains against Russia even after the Cold War ended on Russia’s side in 1991. Whereas the billionaires who control America’s arms-makers profit from this military competition against Russia, the controlling interest in all of Russia’s arms-makers is Russia’s government, which simply suffers the expense of that competition and would greatly prefer to end that competition. It’s just a drain on Russia’s treasury. The profit-motive isn’t driving the arms-producers in countries that control their own arms-makers. The government leads the nation there, basically because the nation’s billionaires — even if they are minority stockholders of the armaments-firms — don’t. And the reason the billionaires don’t is that the arms-producers in Russia are controlled by the government, not by any private investors.

Consequently, in countries that socialize arms-production, ‘humanitarian’ excuses don’t need to be invented in order to create new ‘enemies’. Instead, the goal is for the number of enemies to be reduced, so that the nation itself will be safer. Their arms-producers don’t need constantly to generate (by lobbying, media-propaganda, etc.) authorized targets (‘enemies’ such as Iraq, Syria, etc.), because such a nation, as this, has designed its system to be driven for protecting the public’s safety, and not for any investors’ profits. If an armaments-firm, in such a nation, goes out-of-business, that’s entirely okay, so long as that nation’s safety isn’t being reduced by ending the firm. The international policy of such a country is totally different from that of a country in which arms-makers’ profits, and not the entire nation’s welfare, is in the driver’s seat regarding all foreign policies.

If arms-makers are being driven for profits, then target-nations are needed in order to expand profits so as to serve their investors. Such a country is run actually for its investors, not for its public. But if the arms-makers are being driven to serve the government instead of to serve private investors, the government is controlling the armament-firms. The nation’s safety is the objective in such a land, because increasing profits for private investors in its weapons-firms is not the company’s objective. Any profits to such investors, are then irrelevant to the government. It’s truly sink-or-swim, for each of such a nation’s arms-makers — not socialism-for-the-rich, and capitalism (actually fascism) for the poor, such as is the case in the United States.

In a nation such as the United States, the constant need for new wars is being constantly driven by investors’ needs for expanding both markets and targets. And — since in the arms-making business, all of the markets are one’s own government, plus all of its allied governments (no significantconsumer-business whatsoever, which is why such firms are fundamentally different from the firms in all other types of fields) — the government needs to serve its armaments-firms, because those firms are totally dependent upon the government, and upon its international diplomacy (to increase the sales of its armaments, and thereby to serve the billionaires who control the armaments-firms). So: the government there naturally becomes an extension of its major “contractors” or armaments-firms. The politicians know this, though they don’t want to talk publicly about it, because they don’t want the voters to know who is actually in the driver’s seat. They know whom they are actually serving, which is the billionaires who control the armaments-firms. So: those politicians, whatever they might say in public (“America shouldn’t be the policeman for the world,” etc.), always actually vote to invade (Iraq, Syria, etc.), and to approve the first stage of any war, which is economic sanctions (such as against Russia itself, or Iran, or Iraq, or Syria, or Venezuela, etc.), and it’s always allegedly being done “to serve God, mother and country” at home, and “to expand freedom and protect human rights in that dictatorially ruled country” abroad. This is basically the marketing campaign for the owners of the armaments firms. The winning politicians in such countries are the ones that those billionaires support. In such a country, it’s almost impossible for any politician who is competing for a national office to succeed who isn’t being funded by those billionaires. And, the billionaires’ ‘news’-media support only such candidates. That’s why there’s almost no possibility for an honest person to be elected (or appointed( to any national public office in the United States.

If a nation’s sole reason for producing weapons is in order to protect the public — a public purpose — then there is no reason for the government to lie so as to demonize foreign leaders such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Salvador Allende, Viktor Yanukovych, and Nicolo Maduro. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with how bad (or good) the demonized leader actually is.

Why does the U.S. government demonize those people, while simultaneously serving (if not actually installing) barbaric dictators such as King Saud, Augusto Pinochet, Castillo Armas, and the Shah? The publicly stated reasons are always ‘humanitarian’ (when not ‘national defense’ — and often, as in 2003 Iraq — both at once). The alleged purpose is to ‘bring democracy to the people there’, and to ‘protect human rights, which are being violated’ by ‘the dictator’ — but it’s actually in order to make suckers out of their country’s own population, so as to serve the billionaires whose income can’t be boosted in any other way than to turn ‘enemies’ (targets) into ‘allies’ (markets) — to conquer those ‘enemies’. This is just a marketing campaign, and the voters are not the consumers of these products, but they are instead merely the gulls who have to be fooled in order for those profits to keep rolling in, to the (usually) offshore accounts of those billionaires. This is not the type of socialism in which the government controls the economy, but instead the type of economy in which the economy — actually the billionaires who control the armaments-firms — control the government. This is why it’s “socialism for the rich and capitalism for everybody else.” (The term “fascism” can be used for that.)

This is the New America. And here is the New America Foundation, which is one of the many ‘non-profit’ PR arms of this new America. (That one represents mainly Democratic Party billionaires. Hereis one that instead represents mainly Republican Party billionaires.) These are taxpayer-subsidized public relations agencies for their businesses. These individuals are exceptionally gifted businesspeople, because they deeply understand how to fool the public, and they understand that the public never learns and so history just keeps repeating itself, such as in 1953 Iran, and then in 1954 Guatemala, and 1973 Chile, and 2003 Iraq, and 2019 Venezuela, and so many others, ad nauseum. And it goes on and on, for decades if not forever.

But how can the world be protected from such countries? If there is not widespread public recognition that ‘permanent war for perpetual peace’ is a vicious lie, then can there be any other way to do it? Maybe not. Apparently, constant lying by the government and by its (i.e., by its billionaires’) media — and by all of its successful national politicians — is required in any such country. This seems to be the only effective way to control the public in such a country; and, if the public there aren’t deceived, then the arms-firms’ control over the government won’t even be possible. So, regarding foreign policies, the lying in such a country is constant — especially about foreign affairs.

For example, that explains the stunning findings, in the recent study by a media-watchdog organization, that “Zero Percent of Elite Commentators Oppose Regime Change in Venezuela”. Having something like this happen after  Americans were lied into invading Iraq in 2003, is proof that (and it explains why) the public never learns. This is the way the system has been designed to function, siphoning off the society’s wealth into billionaires’ — largely offshore — accounts. The system is actually set up to operate that way. And the system’s owners (and their media) call this ‘democracy’, and are peddling that ‘democracy’ to the rest of the world.

This is a very successful trick, because — at least until now — the public never learns. (Of course, the system itself is set up so that they won’t.) The public never learns that the actual enemy is the domestic aristocracy itself. But one major American magazine recently made fun of this by headlining “In Billionaires Is the Preservation of the World” praising them as “nature’s own life-preserver” and closing by “With life itself depending on it, how do we determine which billionaires to kiss up to?” The enemy is within, but it’s no joke, and (as Trump makes so clear) ‘aliens’ get the blame, while the domestic aristocracy just get the money.

This type of racket has worked that way for thousands of years, and yet it has always remained “Top Secret,” or (at least) “Confidential” or etc.; but, anyway, very private — and not acknowledged in their ‘news’-media, but instead publicly denied (though, occasionally, also joked-about).

A more-serious phrase for this is “the Deep State.”

—————

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.

Why ‘Russiagate’ Is the Same as ‘WMD in Iraq’ for America’s Mainstream Media

ERIC ZUESSE

America’s Democratic Party ‘news’-media are now defending themselves against charges that they had trumpeted false allegations against Donald Trump regarding “Russiagate.” Republican Party ‘news’-media are strutting because they didn’t. But in the lead-up to America’s invasion and destruction of Iraq (and here’s “How the US Destroyed Iraq”), the mainstream ‘news’-reporting was just as bad then as now, only with the partisan sides switched. The chief difference between then and now is only that the media now have been fictitiously demonizing Putin and Trump by means of lies, whereas back in 2002 and 2003, they were fictitiously demonizing Saddam Hussein by means of lies.

In that prior instance (lies about Iraq), the Republican media were the worse of the two Party-propaganda-lines. Republican Party followers were the more-deceived back then, just as Democratic Party followers are the more-deceived today. Whereas, in 2003, increased exposure to news, about what had led up to the invasion of Iraq, produced, for Democrats, higher scores on a test of knowledge about that matter; for Republicans, it actually produced lower scores about that matter. For Republicans, at that time, the ‘news’-reporting decreased, rather than increased, a historically accurate understanding of the lead-up to (and into) Iraq-invasion events. By contrast, now in 2019, when the evidence has finally become clear that the Russiagate accusations against Trump were intensely politically motivated, it is Democratic Party followers who are the more-deceived today. In fact, whereas, back in January of this year, 83% of Republicans said that the reason for the Russiagate investigation was “politically motivated,” 84% of Democrats said that it was not. The more that Democrats had become influenced by Democratic-Party ‘news’-media, the more inaccurate their understandings of the events were. On this matter, Democrats were oblivious about the reality, just swamped by their own Party’s propaganda — just like had happened to Republicans regarding the invasion of Iraq.

In both of these two instances (both Democratic ‘news’-media now, and Republican ‘news’-media then), all of America's major media actually hid — and continue to hide — the key facts, from the public (even 16 years, now, after the invasion of Iraq). On the deeper-level issues concerning Governmental policies, there is bipartisan deceit against the American public. These are issues on which all of the billionaires were and are united, against the American public (and especially against the “40.6% million people in poverty” — the neediest instead of the richest who are themselves, those billionaires), and they therefore benefit from the public’s ignorance and misconceptions about such matters (so that the Government will continue serving chiefly themselves). These super-rich are determined to continue controlling Government-policies, for their own benefits, like increased ‘defense’ spending to buy increased products from their corporations such as Lockheed Martin, and for increased access to raw materials by their firms such as ExxonMobil. It’s all — according to their propaganda-media, ‘in defense of freedom and democracy and human rights’. That’s always the billionaires’ line. It’s always “Trust us!” “Our Government is democratic — a democracy, not a dictatorship [by us]!” So, the message from them is: invade Iraq! And: oppose any US President who would meet privately to negotiate with Russia’s President! America’s billionaires fear peace abroad. They thrive on conquest (their coups and invasions) abroad. For example, this is the reason why, consistently in Gallup’s findings, “The military” (which is actually the most corrupt of all American institutions) scores, by far, at the very top of the 17 listed “Institutions” in American society — way above (for examples) “the Supreme Court,“ or “The church or organized religion,” or “The public schools.” The billionaires shape the culture, and this is how they’ve managed to get the US to spend about half of the entire world’s total military expenses — all to be paid for by the taxes and governmental debts that the public (and their descendants), and not merely those billionaires (the actual beneficiaries) pay, and will be paying in the future. This is the way that a global empire is built, and maintained — ‘for peace and freedom and democracy and human rights around the world’.

The two Parties disagree with each other, but each Party represents only a different faction among the billionaires (not among the public) regarding what they want the public to believe. The billionaires and their corporations contribute the vast majority of the money to the major candidates, and control the think tanks and ‘news’-media that enables each winning national US politician to become and remain a winning national US politician and thus to become and be the President, or member of Congress. So, these few extremely wealthy individuals are America’s real, behind-the-scenes, government — the “Deep State” that’s represented by the top levels at CIA, Britain’s MI6, Wall Street, etc. (all servants — a few of whom are billionaires themselves — of America’s billionaires, and of their allied foreign billionaires).

No faction within America’s 585 billionaires actually represents the American public — neither group of billionaires (Democrats or Republicans) represents the public of either Party. Each of them represents only him-or-her-self and the property (and employees and other agents) which that individual controls. (Of course, that’s millions of people, who are hired and promoted and demoted by the billionaires.) But because billionaires’ wealth is so extremely concentrated within this tiny number of people (585), and is so huge, and because their corruption reigns, these few individuals effectively control the Government. Especially America’s foreign policies (including, in 2002, toward Iraq; and, in 2016-18, ‘Russiagate’, toward Russia and Trump) represent only the interests of billionaires, not of the American people, who are mainly interested in domestic affairs, such as health care, education, crimes, etc.

Right now, the billionaires are (via their media-proxies) battling each other over whom to blame for ‘Russiagate’: if not Trump, then whom? But that’s only a Democrat-versus-Republican issue. It appeals to the partisans on each side. It’s more of the same, so that the billionaires’ control over America’s Government continues to face no challenge.

Whenever American billionaires’ desires contradict the public’s needs, the latter have “a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”, and this has been scientifically proven to have been true since at least 1981. Though it’s true regarding any field of public policy, it is the most true regarding international policies, because those are the ones on which deceiving the public is the easiest to do. Furthermore, the controlling owners of international corporations (and these are billionaires) are vastly more concerned about foreign affairs than the general public is. Whereas domestic affairs interest everyone, foreign affairs receive far less attention from most people — but not from billionaires, who are, if anything, often even more interested in those matters.

Donald Trump represents one faction of America’s billionaires; Barack Obama represented another faction of them; but each President (at least since 1981) has been representing only them (America’s billionaires). Furthermore, the 2016 Presidential contest was no exception to this rule; and, so, American democracy has been destroyed by America’s own billionaires, and not by any foreign country. Russia didn’t do this to us. Not even Israel (which interferes in American national elections vastly more than does Russia, and which also has officially the fourth-largest of all foreign nations’ lobbies in the US Congress) did. America’s billionaires did (and do) it. Overwhelmingly, it is they who actually control America’s foreign policies. (Moreover, on international matters, there appears to be virtual unanimity amongst the aristocracies of Britain, Israel, and US; and, on 15 February 2009, Britain’s Guardian reported that “The pro-Israel lobby’s contributions reach a majority of US politicians. In 2018, it spent money on 269 representatives’ and 57 senators’ campaigns, and gave to Democrats at a two to one ratio.” So: it’s not only the Republican Party that’s fronting for Israel. To front for Israel is also to front for America’s billionaires — even for the roughly 70% of America’s non-Jewish billionaires. But to front for Russia is ‘traitorous’ while to front for Israel is ‘not’ — and yet Russia never attacked and slaughtered Americans, whereas Israel did, and so did another ‘US ally’, Saudi Arabia. (Yet, America’s aristocracy is closely allied with both Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s — not just with Britain’s.)

All of these assertions will be further documented and exemplified in what follows.

The two examples to be focused upon here will be America’s successful rape of Iraq in 2003, and the Democratic Party’s unsuccessful effort, which started in 2016, to delegitimize the Republican President Donald Trump as being some type of Russian agent.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003

Here’s Robert Mueller testifying to Congress about WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq, before we invaded and destroyed Iraq:

On 11 February 2003, the then-FBI Director Mueller testified, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, that: “Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam may supply al-Qaeda with biological, chemical, or radiological material.”

He just reiterated the President’s lies (and he credited Colin Powell’s supposed naiveté in having spouted them — for which deception Powell subsequently apologized, but Mueller never did). Mueller’s concern wasn’t to raise any question about the lies that led to the Iraq-invasion, but was simply to reinforce these lies. He didn’t work for the public. He worked for the President.

As I said 16 September 2016:

On 7 September 2002, US President George W. Bush blatantly lied to concoct a “new report” by the IAEA about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program, and the US news-media reported the statement but hid that it was a lie. He said (and CNN and others quoted it): “a report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need,” when he was asked at a press conference, “Mr. President, can you tell us what conclusive evidence of any nuclear — new evidence you have of nuclear weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein?” Immediately, the IAEA said then that there was no such “new report,” and that the last they were able to find, there was nothing left of WMD in Iraq. The American news-media simply ignored the IAEA’s denial, and we invaded Iraq, almost six months after that boldfaced lie, a lie the press refused to expose, at all — ever. They still haven’t exposed it, even to the present day; and instead there remains a ‘debate’ as to whether George W. Bush lied or was instead merely misled by “defective US intelligence.” In this particular instance, he wasn’t even citing US intelligence, but instead citing the IAEA, and they immediately denied it, but the press failed to report that fact; so, really, the President was simply lying, and the press just continue to lie by saying he had only “been misled by the CIA” (which he actually controlled; but he didn’t control the IAEA). The American press hide the fact that the American President lied his nation into invading Iraq. The press lie that it was only “bad intelligence,” no lying President.

(Because of the news-media’s ignoring the IAEA’s denial of the President’s statement, the author of the IAEA’s denial, Mark Gwozdecky, spoke three weeks later, by phone, with the only journalist who was interested, Joseph Curl of the Washington Times, who headlined on 27 September 2002, “Agency Disavows Report on Iraq Arms” — perhaps that should instead have been “President Lied About ‘Saddam’s WMD’” — and Curl quoted Gwozdecky: “There's never been a report like that [which Bush alleged] issued from this agency… When we left in December '98 we had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons program. We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment.” Other news-media failed to pick up Curl’s article. And, even in that article, there was no clear statement that the President had, in fact, lied — cooked up an IAEA ‘report’ that never actually existed — and that he never corrected his false allegation; that he compounded his lie by not correcting it.)

This is hardly the only instance where the US news-media cover for the President’s lies about foreign affairs, by merely stenographically reporting what he says, while hiding the truth that his statement was a baldfaced lie. For example, how many times have you read in the newspapers, or in a magazine, or seen on TV, or heard on the radio (all of which are supposed to report these things), that in February 2014, the Obama Administration perpetrated a bloody coup d’etat that overthrew the democratically elected President of Ukraine, and replaced his government with a racist-fascist, or anti-Russian nazi, government, so that Ukraine, which had been at peace for decades, was now suddenly torn by a racist bloody civil war — a war of ethnic cleansing? Oh? You were instead told that ‘democracy’ started (instead of ended) when Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown then, in a ‘revolution,’ not in any US “coup”?

The very next day, on 8 September 2002, the New York Times bannered “THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE IRAQIS; US SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS”, and reported that, “In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.” That, too, turned out to be fiction, which the ‘news’-media stenographically reported to be reality, as any propaganda-agency is paid or otherwise rewarded to do.

Also on September 8th, Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said on CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

On 9 September 2002, the IAEA denied the existence of the ‘new report’ that Bush (seconded by British Prime Minister Tony Blair) had just said was proof that Saddam was within six months of having a nuclear bomb. Neither the NYT nor other ‘news’-media reported that the President had lied on September 7th. So, Gwozdecky of IAEA tried again, on September 27th, but the NYT and all the others continued to ignore them. That (the US President’s deceiving this nation into an invasion) wasn’t included to report — wasn’t even buried (like on an inside page) — in “All the News That’s Fit to Print”. Did the NYT (and WP and CNN, etc,) lose subscribers, and go out of business, for that serial-deceit of the public? The opposite: they thrived. And, now, they accuse smaller news-media (which had had had nothing to do with deceiving Americans into invading Iraq) of providing ‘fake news’. And the standards of American ‘journalism’ are just as poor today as they were back in 2002 and 2003.

Then, on 8 October 2002, President Bush delivered, to the nation, his major address on why we needed to invade Iraq very soon. He said: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Condoleezza Rice’s fictitious “mushroom cloud” was now — exactly a month later — President Bush’s, too.

On 18 March 2003, President Bush ordered the UN’s weapons-inspectors out of Iraq by telling them that if they wouldn’t be gone within 48 hours they’d be under US bombing there. Hans Blix and his team rushed out, to meet that deadline. The Iraqi people couldn’t do any such thing — Bush’s warning simply spelt doom for them.

Nobody in the mainstream press, at the time, or afterward, reported that the IAEA had actually issued no such ‘new report’. It didn’t exist, at all. The American public didn’t know that Bush was lying through his teeth and that this invasion was 100% a blatant international war-crime. They didn’t know, because the billionaires’ American ‘news’-media hid that fact.

All of these ‘news’ lies are stenographic ‘reporting’, and it’s endemic in all of America’s mainstream ‘news’-media, all of which are controlled by billionaires, via ownership and/or their corporations’ advertising. Stenographic ‘news’-reporting is still as acceptable to them as it was to them then, when we invaded and destroyed Iraq, on the basis of those stenographically reported lies from the Government and its agents.

That’s America’s mainstream. Many in alternative, smaller, news-media had reported over and over and over and over and over and over — and even Rupert Murdoch’s own London Times had reported as early as 26 November 2009 (after the Republican President Bush was no longer in office and had been replaced by a Democrat) — that all of the insiders had known that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). What all of the mainstream ‘news’-media were publishing, back in 2003, were merely lies from the Government. What should have been the first question, then, on 9 September 2002 when the IAEA said that there wasn’t any “new report” from them, about the matter such as the US President had alleged? The questions were never asked, much less followed up immediately to expose the response to be yet another lie. This is how Bush and his team got away with mass-murder abroad. There was no resistance, in any of the mainstream (the billionaire-controlled) media. Not even in the Democratic-Party ‘news’-media. This was bipartisan evil (by the billionaires) and ignorance (by the public).

On 22 January 2018, CNN reported that, “George W. Bush's favorable rating has grown from 33% to 61% since he left office. … Most of Bush's climb back to popularity came from Democrats and independents. His favorability mark among Democrats has soared from only 11% in February 2009 to a majority 54% now.” Maybe that’s because of ‘news’-media such as CNN, continuing to trumpet ongoing official deceits as if those were instead established truths. The US Government can lie as much as it wants, because there’s nothing to stop it from lying. There is no accountability in an aristocracy, but only in a democracy (and the US is an aristocracy).

The media-mainstream, and its supporters, refuse to become honest. Mainstreamers think that they’re terrific as they are, and certainly shouldn’t be put out of business for the mass-murdering lies they’ve pumped. The ‘Russiagate’ fraud is the latest example of this. If it had succeeded, then not only would US ‘defense’-spending soar even more and the Government’s domestic spending plunge, but World War III against Russia would suddenly become enormously more likely.

Russiagate-Trump

On 23 March 2019, main conclusions from the Mueller Report — the report from US Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III — became published. Democratic Party politicians and ‘news’-media were shocked and stunned that Mueller’s report asserted: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” One needs to see the complete sentence, there, not just part of it (which is all that was released); but, if this quotation from the Report isn’t out-of-context, then the entire investigation was pursuing a Democratic Party lie and found it to be a lie.

On 24 March 2019, Michael Calderone at Politico said that “while fair-minded criticism can be beneficial to the news media, there are likely to also be bad faith attempts to delegitimize journalism.” He said there “journalism,” instead of “propaganda.” He was writing propaganda for America’s Democratic-Party ‘news’-media. Calderone was happy to report that “Some journalists have already pushed back on the weekend criticism. ‘Given the issues, stakes, and seriousness with which special counsel treated all of this, the media’s coverage of Russia-Trump connection and possible obstruction over the last two years was somewhere between about right and not quite aggressive enough,’ tweeted Esquire’s Ryan Lizza.” On the same day, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post headlined “Conclusion of Mueller probe raises anew criticisms of coverage” and reported that “Among the theories commentators advanced was one by New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait, who speculated in a cover story in July about whether ‘the dark crevices of the Russia scandal run not just a little deeper but a lot deeper.’ … In a statement Sunday night, Chait stood by his article. ‘That story relied on reports in credible public sources. None of those reports have been refuted.’” That’s rabidly false, though the top editors at both the Washington Post and the New York Times were quoted there as making similar false assertions. Farhi continued: “In fact, revelations by the Times and The Washington Post about contacts between Russian agents and Trump’s campaign advisers in 2016 helped prompt the inquiry that the special counsel took over in May 2017. The two newspapers shared a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the issue that year.” He seemed to be actually bragging about his very successful and severely failed ‘news’-paper and its main competitor.

On March 25th, Amy Chozick in the New York Times bannered “After Mueller Report, News Media Leaders Defend Their Work”, and she reported that, “Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, said he was ‘entirely comfortable’ with the network’s coverage. ‘We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,’ Mr. Zucker said in an email.” Furthermore: “Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, defended coverage of the Russian investigation, including the decision to publish a dossier put together by British intelligence officer Christopher Steele full of tantalizing (and unsubstantiated) reports about Russian efforts to blackmail Mr. Trump. ‘It’s pretty hard to imagine a scenario in which people were aware of its existence but not allowed to see it,’ Mr. Smith said of the dossier.” Smith took seriously the “unsubstantiated” ‘dossier’ that the DNC had hired for creating the myth that the cause of Clinton’s loss was Putin and Russia, instead of herself, and her profoundly corrupt Party (no different, basically, from the Republican Party).

On March 26th, The Hill headlined “Media have account to settle with American people over Mueller investigation coverage”, and a journalism professor said that the news industry” had been “stumbling around unsuccessfully in the dark trying to find fact nuggets on which to build the Mueller story.” Two days later, he told Wisconsin Public Radio that “The media did underperform over the last couple of years.” The problem was just blunders, and ‘underperformance’ (instead of its long-proven-normal performance) — not the entire corrupt system of ‘journalism’ in America, where the people who do the hiring are answerable ultimately to the same billionaires who effectively control the Government. No — not that — not at all (according to him).

As I have pointed out and documented (via links to solid ultimate sources, sometimes in the linked-to sources in linked-to articles, but all ultimate sources having been very carefully verified by this reporter as being true, and those sources remaining solid), "All US Gov’t. Accusations Against Russia’s Gov’t. Are Lies.” That’s right: all of “Russiagate” is based on very dubious ‘evidence’. This means that the time-line, in the Mueller Report, lists some ‘events’ that did not happen, and some events that were not partisanly involved in the 2016 Presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

And Robert Mueller himself has a very bad record, but how widely has that been reported?