The Saker.is
Police State
Look Homeward, Hegemon Part 1: Cold War 2.0 Abroad, Cold Civil War Between the U.S. Government and Its People At Home
by American Kulak, The Saker.is:
Introduction: We want to start by thanking The Saker for giving us the opportunity to publish a series of articles for this community that looks at the late, great American Empire from a slightly different perspective. While most Vineyard readers come to this website looking for analysis of the war in Ukraine or conflicts in the Middle East, we felt it would be useful to take a look at dysfunctional or ‘Empire of Chaos’ spreading American foreign policy as a reflection of the accelerating socio-economic collapse one sees in the American ‘homeland’.
For those Saker readers already living in the United States or ‘awake’ to the alternative media, some of what we publish here will be old news. But since so much of the Saker’s readership comes from all over the world, we hope this piece will shed new light for foreigners on the growing crisis of American economy, society and governance that will soon permanently ‘closing the window’ for aggressive U.S. policies worldwide — but in the meantime over the next several years makes Washington MORE of a threat to the American people and the world.
Since the relationship between American aggression abroad and police militarization and violence at home is such a broad topic, and one broadly discussed since the Vietnam War was accompanied by rioting and social upheaval across the U.S. and Western Europe during the 1960s, we felt this vast topic needed to be narrowed down to comprehensible causes and effects. We also feel it’s necessary to categorize the topic of American ‘collapse’ into four broad categories:
1) economics — primarily the looming end of the dollar’s world reserve currency status
2)growing ethnic tensions, linked to the decline of opportunities for the lower and middle classes, enflamed by widely publicized police brutality and deaths or injuries in police custody. However, this discourse must come with the caveat that, regardless of blacks and whites agreeing that race relations have deteriorated since President Barack Obama took office in public opinion surveys, nearly all groups of Americans are increasingly mistrustful of the federal government and no new presidential Administration in 2017 is likely to change that
3) societal shifts along the ‘bread and circuses’ ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ decadence lines that keep the majority of the population docile or indifferent to their fate
4) ecological/sustainability crises
The United States and its leading allies ‘won’ Cold War 1.0 in 1989-91, or at least the Soviet system ‘lost’ by conceding its own demise. The 1990s saw new and emerging markets of labor and natural resources opening up in Russia, China and across Eurasia. This benefited the Empire, its richest individuals, and perhaps the so-called ‘1%’ — but not most of the American people.
This time around, given the facts we’re laying out in this series, we fully expect the U.S. to ‘lose’ Cold War 2.0, even if the American people won’t realize the costs their government has inflicted upon them until it’s too late.
– The Kulak
From Kiev to Baltimore: ‘Whataboutism’ vs. ‘AfroMaidans’, and Deadly Force for Me Uncle Sam to Stop Insurrection But Not For Thee, Governments Washington Doesn’t Like
It was late April and police cars and businesses were burning in Baltimore, Maryland, a mere 60 kilometers northeast or one hour’s drive from the White House in Washington D.C. Residents of the city’s African-American supermajority neighborhoods were angry about the death Freddie Gray Jr., a 25-year-old black man, while in the custody of Baltimore police two weeks before. When Freddie Gray died in a coma from spinal injuries he sustained during transport in the back of a police wagon, hundreds of residents began to protest outside the West Baltimore police station. After several nights of peaceful demonstrations from April 18 to 25, agitators in the crowd began smashing windows and looting businesses like McDonalds and pelting police officers with paving stones, injuring several policemen. At least two photojournalists with clearly visible press credentials were also beaten by Baltimore police.
The use of social media like Twitter by unknown provocateurs on April 27 threatening a ‘Purge’ riot, referencing a series of Hollywood horror films about a nationwide declaration of violent anarchy, created a pretext for Baltimore police in full riot gear to shut down public and school bus transportation for students at the predominantly black Frederick Douglass High School. Numerous high school and college campuses in the area were also shut down as police were pelted by black youths with paving stones around the Mondawmin Mall and Metro stations, with police throwing stones back at the rioters. A CVS pharmacy was set on fire after the employees had evacuated and a fire hose to extinguish the blaze was punctured by provocateurs. More businesses, many of them with local or black owners, were looted. That evening a Baltimore Orioles major baseball game at Camden Yards was postponed. The next day April 28 Maryland National Guardsmen rolled into the city with Humvees and a curfew was declared, ending the riots. Maryland National Guard troops left the city and the curfew was lifted a week later.
According to Christopher Miller, a former editor for the Kyiv Post and US Peace Corps volunteer in the Donbass, Russian media was “loving the Baltimore riots”.1 In an article for the website Mashable that squeezes in Miller’s pro-Kiev dispatches from Ukraine between mental fluff like “The Most Unforgettable ‘Mad Men’ Fashion Moments” or “The French Fry Burger Bomb is Here to Clog Your Arteries”, he complained:
“As the world watched TV screens and Twitter streams showing Baltimore in chaos, Russia’s propaganda machine got to work exploiting the unrest with what is known locally as “whataboutism.”
In the Soviet era, any criticism of the Motherland — such human rights violations or censorship — was met with a ‘what about…’ in an attempt to redirect attention away from Moscow.
Baltimore’s protests were used in the Russian media as a comparison with the situation in Ukraine, where protesters in February 2014 ousted the country’s Moscow-leaning president, Viktor Yanukovych, after three months of deadly clashes with security forces.
For the Kremlin, unrest in the U.S. — starting with Ferguson last year — is an opportunity to heave mud at Washington for its support of Ukraine’s pro-Western Maidan protests…”
Miller’s piece went on to say that RT’s In the Now program2 misled viewers by omitting that there was “virtually no looting in Kiev” and “it was police who first assaulted protesters in Kiev overnight on Nov. 30, 2013, kicking off the period of unrest. In nearly 10 minutes of video, the program does not show one instance in which police in Kiev attack protesters.” This claim that the Maidan did not involve any theft or looting of property is disputed by Moscow State University lecturer Mark Sleboda. He tweeted last week that members of his family witnessed the victorious ‘Maidan self-defense’ fighters forcefully evicting the owners of apartments requisitioned for their ‘heroes’ in Kiev during the weeks following Yanukovych’s violent ouster.2
If Miller wants to accuse RT of downplaying the actions of the Berkut, it’s fair to accuse him in response of avoiding the topic of protester initiated violence against policemen and the Maidan coup leading to all sorts of looting and re-distribution of assets, including the ‘reiding’ attempts by Maidan paramilitaries and post-coup ‘volunteer battalions’ against businesses, and the U.S.-backed Kiev regime’s own dispersal of the Maidan camp. It’s also fair to ask Miller if insurrection in the Donbass justified Kiev’s use of bombs, shells and missiles against the people of Donbass whether Yanukovych would’ve been justified in using similar collective punishments against the people of Lviv for being the first in Ukraine (well before Crimea) to take over government buildings, declare independence from Kiev and to loot arsenals of weaponry. (Although we concede the question is probably moot since no soldiers or pilots from Donbass would’ve obeyed such criminal orders from Yanukovych in January or February of 2014, whereas individuals from western Ukraine, brainwashed on the cult of Galicia-n supremacy that issvidomite Ukrainian nationalism, have seldom demonstrated qualms about attacking eastern Ukrainians using indiscriminate weapons).
Since we know that New York City Police dismantled the encampments of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement citing numerous purported health and safety violations and petty crimes committed around the activists’ spaces, we don’t have to imagine how American cops would deal with a peaceful ‘Maidan’ in New York City or Washington D.C. Nor do we have to imagine how American cops would react to being bombarded with Molotov cocktails or having their shield lines assaulted with swords, metal rods, chains, spears and being shot with pepper spray or pistols at point blank range like the Berkut riot policemen were for weeks. The fact is, as Mashable’s Christopher Miller and other U.S. journalists know very well, if Americans tried to repeat Maidan-ist tactics against American riot police, they would be shot down in a hail of police gunfire. Or at least shot with ‘non-lethal’ rubber bullets if tear gas failed to disperse the mob.
There’s also the issue wherein Ukraine the military refused to disperse the violent fighters on the Maidan, and only provided the Berkut with a single armored vehicle which was burned out with a mass Molotov cocktail barrage (proudly shown on Right Sector’s recruiting videos made at the time)3. Whereas American state National Guard and federal military units would have no compunction about deploying troops, machine-gun equipped Humvees, and armored vehicles to quell any ‘Maidan’ style civil unrest, as in Baltimore or during the 2005 aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
Race, the ‘War on Drugs’ and the American ‘Casino Gulag’ Prison Industrial Complex
This issue of force and how far American police can go in militarizing themselves with assault rifles, tear gas or stun grenade launchers, body armor and armored vehicles is hardly an abstract one. Much like the debate over NSA mass surveillance, it cuts to the heart of Americans’ attitudes towards and ‘trust’ in their government. It also is an area where the alternative media has made great strides in ‘waking people up’ to the growing power of the federal government in local, county and state law enforcement agencies through the so-called ‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on terror’ giving out grants and slightly used Department of Defense equipment like Humvees or MRAPs (mine resistant armored personnel carriers) to police and sheriff’s departments.
Last year’s photographs and video depicting black protesters holding up their hands saying, “Don’t shoot” confronted by lines of riot police equipped with military style-body armor and assault rifles during protests over the killing of another young black man by police in the St. Louis, Missouri suburb of Ferguson brought the police militarization debate into the mainstream.4 As did the smothering death of Eric Garner, a black man who was arrested by a white cop for the victimless ‘crime’ of selling individual cigarettes in lieu of heavily taxed, ‘nanny state’ cigarette packs or cartons in New York City.5 As did the massive manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers after the Boston bombing in which militarized police units pointed guns at peaceful, unarmed Bostonians while locking down the city in search of a single skinny teenager.6 The subsequent grand jury conclusions that the white police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson acted in self-defense during a struggle, or that Freddie Gray Jr. had a long rap sheet of drug arrests prior to his death in police custody for which six police officers have been indicted, have not changed the growing perception that American police are increasingly violent and out of control towards the public they ‘serve and protect’.
One stunning statistic reveals that American police are more likely to kill and to be killed than their peers in every peacetime developed country. This spring the ‘liberal’ ThinkProgress organization reported that more Americans were killed by police officers in March 2015 than Britons who died at the hands of policemen throughout the entire 20th century (presumably including the violent years of ‘the Troubles’ in British Northern Ireland). As an upshot against American criticism of China’s own formidable surveillance and police state apparatus, “China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States, recorded 12 killings by law enforcement officers in 2014.”7
To be sure, American blacks and some Latinos have been wary of the police for decades. The so-called ‘war on drugs’ has a hugely disparate impact on the arrest and incarceration rates of young black males, which contributes to America having the highest incarceration or former inmate rate on the planet — at least outside of the Seychelles and perhaps North Korea. As of late 2011, nearly 1% of the entire U.S. population of over 300,000,000 Americans (0.94%) was living behind bars in some capacity, in either federal or state prisons. The percentage of U.S. adults under correctional supervision, meaning in jail, on parole or probation is nearly 3% (2.9%). In 2009 non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% of the total U.S. prison and jail population (841,000 black males and 64,800 black females out of a total of 2,096,300 males and 201,200 females)8. This compares to self-identified non-Hispanic blacks making up just 13.6% of the American population in the 2010 U.S. Census.9 According to Antonio Moore in his Huffington Post article, “there are more African American men incarcerated in the U.S. than the total prison populations in India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Finland, Israel and England combined.”10
In 2009 America’s oldest political magazine The Nation reported that corporations that utilize sub-minimum wage (because taxpayers are picking up the cost of food and housing inmates, whose earnings are held in escrow) prison labor include notable names like “Walmart, Eddie Bauer, Victoria’s Secret, Microsoft, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Nintendo, Chevron Corporation, Bank of America, Koch Industries, Boeing and Costco Wholesale.”11 The Nation article says that since a change in federal laws in 1979, prison labor has provided American corporations with a cheap, local substitute for outsourcing ‘sweatshop’ style labor to Third World or overseas countries where wages and transportation costs are rising. This state of affairs had led RT host Max Keiser, a vocal critic of the private prison operating Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) to declare that the U.S. is operating a ‘casino gulag’ economic model.12 Others who have criticized American’s lucrative ‘prison industrial complex’ include the anti-war writer Chris Hedges.13
Beyond the Color Line: An Increasingly Predatory, Heavily Armed State Impacts Us All
For decades most Republican politicians, with the ‘tough on crime’ GOP dominant at the state and local government level across the South and Western parts of the U.S. did not have to address these facts. Or at least, conservative leaning magazines and think tanks provided a slew of statistics showing that African-Americans were more likely to interact with the criminal justice system because they committed a disproportionate share of the drug and violent crimes in America. Occasionally such statements would be carefully prefaced by repeating the late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescient warnings that the ‘Great Society’ programs launched in the 1960s would undermine the black family, leading to generations of young black males raised without fathers.14
The Rodney King beating and subsequent LA Riots, with whites and Koreans often on one side and blacks on the other, reinforced the impression among many white Americans that the police may have gone too far at times, but the thin blue line was the only thing standing between them and a violent ghetto culture. The combination of ‘white flight’ to the suburbs and urban crime waves of the late 1960s to the early 1990s built up geographic and mental barriers between white and black American interactions with the State and law enforcement. There were also hints — though always kept at bay by the opropribium of the supposedly ‘liberal’ mainstream press — that the disparate outcomes in education and incomes between white and black America were primarily due to average IQ or innate cultural characteristics in books such as Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (though in fairness to Murray, he seems to have backed away from the emphasis on alleged racial disparities in IQ with his more recent book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010).15
However, distrust of government and law enforcement among American whites began to rise during the 1990s, with the Brady Bill gun control laws of the Bill Clinton presidency and a series of violent incidents involving ‘anti-government’ groups or individuals. The standoff between the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) and Branch Davidian sect leader David Koresh over his alleged illegal arms stockpiles in 1993 ended in the fiery deaths of scores of women and children, in a blaze likely started thanks to the BATF’s negligence. A 1992 standoff between Randy Weaver and armed federal agents became a scandal for the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI in Congress after Weaver was acquitted of murdering federal officers. The federal trial publicized the ugly fact that an FBI sniper named Lon Horiuchi shot and killed Randy Weaver’s wife Vicki as she held their child in her arms.16
Civil asset forfeitures, on the rise since the ‘war on drugs’ exploded in the 1980s, have led to police or county sheriff’s departments routinely seizing cash and using it to fund operations or big ticket weapons and equipment purchases.17 This has broadened mistrust of the police and sheriff’s departments across class and racial lines, as many white conservatives and libertarians believe the practice of seizing cash during traffic stops without any proof that’s it is related to the drug trade or any charges being brought against the owner is not only government theft, but part of a larger ‘war on cash’ by the State eager to force all transactions into the banking system, where they can be tracked by the government. Furthermore, the rise of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team raids together with the war on drugs, and the profusion of armed federal agents such that even the Department of Education has a SWAT team, have fueled concerns that America’s federal and local law enforcement agencies have in effect become a domestic standing army of the type the Founding Fathers opposed.18
While some of these concerns were ameliorated or downplayed during the presidency of George W. Bush from 2001 to 2008, they have accelerated during President Barack Obama’s time in office as the economy has stagnated and fears about Washington imposing some sort of martial law or repressive crackdown after an economic collapse have grown — as has a general contempt for authority and its abuse at all levels. The recent string of ugly police incidents involving the brutal use of lethal force, tasering or beating suspects, or shooting fleeing suspects in the back have prompted at least one white right wing blogger who goes by the handle Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale, whose father Robert Beale was spent years in federal prison as an IRS tax protester) to label numerous blog posts with the handle‘#NWAWasRight19 (referring to the late 1980s group N—ers with Attitude’s infamous rap song ‘F— the Police’)20.
How We Achieved a More Angry, Impoverished and Divided America: Decades of Stagnation and Decline for the Middle and Working Classes
The same de-industrialization and offshoring of the U.S. economy that turned a once thriving metropolis like Detroit that blacks had flocked to from the South during WWII into a bankrupt dystopia effected people of all races, but particularly black and white males without higher education. The easy credit expansion that accompanied President Richard Nixon’s decision to take the U.S. off the gold standard in 1971, the expanding welfare rolls and the warfare state that President Reagan’s deficit-spending fueled military build-up heralded in the 1980s, in retrospect can all be viewed as attempts by the elites to buy social peace.
It is no accident that both rates of union membership and median weekly wages adjusted for inflation peaked in the early 1970s, which suggests that aside from the Internet, safer automobiles and cheaper electronics American living standards have stagnated or declined in the decades since21 (other economists argue the U.S. middle class stopped growing sometime during the 1980s or as recently as the late 1990s tech bubble bursting following the so-called post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ that was actually dirt cheap labor and oil from the newly opened post-Communist world led by Russia and China). Post-1965 mass immigration, particularly from Asia and low-skilled labor from Latin America, also created more competition for U.S.-born low-wage laborers and construction tradesmen, regardless of their race. Even the so-called ‘sexual revolution’, the spread of contraception, promiscuity and the easing of abortion laws can be seen as contributing to the decline of female preferences for a working-class male wage earner as head of household, first in the black and later white and Hispanic communities (Roe v. Wade also, according to pro-life demographers, left the U.S. with a 55 million person-sized vacuum of unborn, aborted human beings22 that immigrants filled).
The so-called ‘war on drugs’, which dramatically expanded after the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ counterculture successfully infiltrated and co-opted the anti-Vietnam War movement by the late 1960s, is viewed by Marxists and Ron Paul/Lew Rockwell libertarians alike as an attempt by corporatist American elites to re-engage in social control over the lower classes, particularly the black underclass. The fact that people of good will coming for completely disparate ideological starting points can come to remarkably similar conclusions about the Drug War, and its impact on poor blacks and whites alike (particularly with the ‘meth’ epidemic in rural and predominantly white parts of the U.S.) shows the erosion of the fake ‘Left/Right’ paradigm that the elites have used for so long to keep Americans divided. But despite the increasing prevalence of ‘awake’ citizens, there remain weapons of mass distraction to keep the vast majority passive and docile.
If illegal drugs like crack cocaine and incarcerating hundreds of thousands for dealing or using them in poor communities is how the elites try to keep urban, predominantly black areas under control, the management of white middle class people facing diminishing prospects has been a more tricky matter for the elite. One answer has been the explosion in white Americans hooked on SSRIs and other prescribed anti-depressants/psychotropic drugs,23 whereas alcohol may have been the drug of choice in the past for their parents and grandparents in coping with pain or disappointments in life — as vodka still is in Ukraine and Russia today. There is a great deal of evidence that such drugs, particularly when prescribed to veterans already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), have contributed to a higher suicide rate.24
Other tools that the elites have successfully used to divide America’s white majority and minorities alike has been the so-called ‘culture war’ issues of gay marriage, abortion and feminism. The ‘bread and circuses’ also includes mega-church and dumbed down or dispensationalist, End Times obsessed Christianity. Then there’s mass quantities of free Internet porn (to divert young men from young women who cannot possibly match the fantasies available online), and endless celebrity news (primarily to distract or brainwash young women with impossible expectations of themselves and the men in their life) and sports for the men (until the economic crisis finally started to bite in recent years, spending on the NFL, Ultimate Fighting, and other pro sports had grown every year) and you have a society more atomized, disparate and where people attend church and talk to their neighbors less than ever before.
It’s the Economy (and the Internet) Stupid that ‘Waking People Up’ to the Power Structures of Our Country and Planet
In the defense of American elites and corporate decisions to offshore numerous jobs, CEOs, business media and individuals alike have all argued:
1) By the 1970s and 80s the American automobile and other manufacturing industries faced stiff competition from an increasingly globalized world, whereas the U.S. had enjoyed a superb period of growth while most of the world’s manufacturing nations were devastated by or recovering from World War II in the 1950s. Thus the ‘Happy Days’ America of thereto fore unimaginable prosperity for a vast middle class of the 1950s and Sixties was an unprecedented situation that never did and could never exist again.
2) Private sector unions and their guaranteed for life pensions had become obstacles to retooling or rebalancing automotive and other concerns to stay competitive, just as government unions and Americans’ pension/health care obligations are creating an unsustainable debt burden on the taxpayers and future budgets from the local to the federal government level. This is in part because no one back in the 1930s when Social Security was established expected recipients to live as long as they do today.
3) Corporations were and have remained under enormous pressure from shareholders and the threat of ‘leveraged buyouts’ from the 1980s on to cut labor costs
4) Neither the government nor the private sector can be blamed for the decline of the traditional American work ethic, willingness to save money rather than buy ‘stuff’ on credit, and ‘family values’.
5) A growing share of Americans are no longer educated for a 21st century work force, but mal-educated or heavily indebted for their college degrees while still feeling entitled to the middle class life of their parents or grandparents. Not enough Americans study statistical math, engineering, hard sciences or computer science to meet the demand for these fields.
Each one of these statements contains some element of truth, but also could spawn numerous rebuttals, or at least replies that can show how elite decision making and ‘Third Way’ corporatist models influenced individual and family decisions (my favorite is ‘what IT worker shortage’ when it comes to the perennial demand by Microsoft for more H-1B visas so it can import Indian IT workers to replace generally older but teachable Americans in this field, or questions as to why Germany can credibly maintain a middle class based on manufacturing but the U.S. has chosen not to do so). We also left off item number 6) no one said global growth could last forever or that the resources of this planet are inexhaustible or sufficient for every adult to attain a lower to upper middle class American equivalent life style. This is what Dr. Mikhail Khazin and other Russian economists who have contributed essays to the Saker and Ft. Rus blogs mean when they say that the current Anglo-American globalist economic model has exhausted itself.25
For the sake of not making this a 5 or 10,000 word essay, we will save these arguments for another time. Suffice to say decades of government and corporate decisions, as well as the failure to achieve 1960s dreams of full racial integration, have led the U.S. to this simmering point: where America is more poised for mass social unrest than at any time since the height of the Vietnam War, or even since the 1861-65 Civil War (which killed nearly one million Americans). Such social unrest, whether the elites like it or not, is bound to have consequences both for their perceived legitimacy at home and their ability to promote themselves as champions of ‘democracy, human rights, rule of law’ abroad.
Regardless of Christopher Miller and other Establishment media complaints about ‘whataboutism’, the task of the U.S. government posing as a force for freedom or prosperity is going to be complicated by not only RT but other foreign media and even domestic American alternative press reporting the truth about America’s decline and acceleration towards an authoritarian police state. The anger America’s elites spread through their mouthpieces about RT is in part, a fury over having the same tactics of emphasizing social problems in dissidents they use against Russia and China turned on the United States. The growing movement to ban or at least demonize RT, as well as the calls for banning ‘trolls’ and instituting other controls over the Internet through the backdoor of copyright trawling and alleged infringement takedowns of content are not coincidental with the global economic crisis that began in 2007-2008. Nor is it coincidence that newly re-elected British Prime Minister David Cameron recently floated a trial balloon for more aggressive censorship in his country, stating: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It’s often meant we have stood neutral between different values. And that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance.”26
While First Amendment jurisprudence will make enforcing whatever Cameron has in mind for Britain difficult in the United States, we’re convinced such statements could just as easily be uttered by a Sen. John McCain or a former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In our opinion, Mr. Cameron is declaring a war on free speech, and so will any American politician who follows his Atlanticist lead. This in terms of the elites’ cold civil war against the populations of the Empire is an equivalent in our view to Nikita Kruschev saying, ‘we will bury you’, as all ‘extremist’ and ‘grievance’ based narratives are now potentially in the digital and off-line crosshairs of the Anglo-American State.
The elites, of both the military-intelligence ‘deep state’ complex and high finance, know America is in deep trouble, despite their own propaganda about the rising stock market and 5 ½ percent U.S. unemployment while excluding millions permanently excluded from the work force. They know that great upheavals are coming. If they cannot simply institute Chinese-style Internet controls on the pretext of some shocking bigger than 9/11 event, then the next best thing is to dominate the web with misinformation, manipulate websites via disavowed denial of service attacks, and harass or divide the alternative media in the real world.
To summarize the domestic and international situation — not only is the U.S. government waging a new Cold War abroad with Russia and China, but there’s abundant evidence it’s also entering a ‘cold war’ with large parts of the American population. As during the first Cold War, with the rise of what President Dwight Eisenhower called ‘the military industrial complex’,27 the external ‘Cold War 2.0’ is supplementing the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ as a driver of enhanced government power at home. Consider:
1) The U.S. is in a second Cold War with Russia and China it initiated in Syria, Ukraine and now with the ‘pivot to Asia’, in order to defend the dollar’s world reserve currency status by scuttling the rise of a Eurasian trade zone competitor and delaying the adoption of the Chinese yuan as a dollar replacement in trade. This is in part, why Washington has not been so concerned with military victory in Ukraine as with keeping the conflict going and Russia as the ‘bad guy’ that must be sanctioned by European allies that would otherwise be integrating with Eurasia. Domestic opposition, however feeble, to the U.S. arming or continuing to subsidize the Kiev regime is damaging to this goal, though Washington’s real worry is growing opposition to its Ukraine and Russia sanctions policies in Europe,28 to which American dissent can only marginally contribute.
2) Washington is increasingly trying to justify its hold over European and Asian allies, and thus the military underpinnings behind the U.S. dollar, by citing Russian, Chinese and Iranian ‘threats’ and ‘aggression’. Constant rotations of forces through Eastern Europe, East Asia and war hysteria/propaganda, complete with made-up or exaggerated naval and aerial altercations,29 as well as downplaying of provocative NATO actions (eg Estonia Day parades 60 miles from downtown St. Petersburg)30 and covert (mercenaries and weapons)31 support for the Kiev regime are part of this effort
3) To this end, Washington claims the government and leading U.S. banks and corporations are under constant and growing cyber-attack from said enemies, with whom federal and deep state elites tell the media ‘we’re already at war’. Such cyber-attacks from nation state adversaries or lone wolf and organized terror attacks from the (un)Islamic State Washington inexplicably never can or never will decisively defeat provides a marvelous environment for fear-mongering and power-grabbing by the feds
4) The federal government, encountering growing skepticism towards much of what it does and dissatisfaction with the economy from all sides in the U.S. from ‘Occupy’ ‘leftists’ to a resurgent right wing libertarian, Constitutionalist and heavily armed ‘patriot’, ‘prepper’ or ‘liberty’ movement, is adopting a siege mentality
5) Increasingly militarized police and integration of federal and local law enforcement, the massive purchases of ammunition and paranoid reports put out concerning ‘domestic extremists’ by the Department of Homeland Security, plus growing attempts to acculturate Americans to being searched at airports, on highway checkpoints, on trains, and at sporting events are all reflections of a government initiating a cold ‘civil war’ with its population. All while accusing government critics, rather than the State, of being the paranoid or ‘conspiracy theorist’ party (in a classic case of projection or accusing the adversary of doing what he himself does and justifies).
In our next contribution to the Saker’s blog, we’ll discuss the upcoming JadeHelm2015 exercise and how it — after fourteen years of war — has eroded trust in the most trusted institution left standing in America, the U.S. military. We’ll also look in to the increasing hysteria emanating from leading online propagandists for the American ‘deep state’ regarding the future of the United States — and their own very revealing anger over not being trusted by fellow Americans. All of these are signs that while we don’t believe America is at serious risk of a ‘hot’ civil war, a cold civil war between the elites, their high-level specialist servants and the vast majority of the population is upon us, and indeed is gaining momentum.
End notes:
1 http://mashable.com/2015/04/29/russia-rt-baltimore-ukraine/
2 https://twitter.com/MarkSleboda1/status/598542455173193728
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Inu_-0dcSU
4 http://www.newsweek.com/how-americas-police-became-army-1033-program-264537
5 http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Eric-Garner-Death-Chokehold-Investigation-272043511.html
6 http://poorrichardsnews.com/post/48566461810/america-we-need-to-talk-about-the-boston
7 http://thefreethoughtproject.com/american-cops-killed-people-month-march-uk-entire-20th-century/#fTOcVAfVYh9USJ76.99
8 http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2200
9 http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf
10 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/antonio-moore/black-mass-incarceration-statistics_b_6682564.html
11 http://www.thenation.com/article/your-valentine-made-prison
12 http://www.maximumtheory.com/blog/tag/corrections-corporation-of-america/
13 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_prison_state_of_america_20141228
14 http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_black_family.html
15 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murray-examines-the-white-working-class-in-coming-apart.html
16 http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/weaver/spenceletter.html
17 https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/asset-forfeiture-abuse
18 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dennis-j-kucinich/police-militarization_b_5687598.html
19 http://voxday.blogspot.com/search/label/NWA%20was%20right
20 http://genius.com/Nwa-fuck-tha-police-lyrics
21 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-why-middle-class-doomed
22 http://www.lifenews.com/2013/01/18/55772015-abortions-in-america-since-roe-vs-wade-in-1973/
23 http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-psychiatric-drug-crisis
24 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/01/us-military-suicide-epidemic-veteran
25 http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/04/khazin-global-recession-will-exceed.html
26 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/britain-is-too-tolerant-and-should-interfere-more-in-peoples-lives-says-david-cameron-10246517.html
27 http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
(YouTube video of Eisenhower’s full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY and excerpt with context from historians https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg-jvHynP9Y)
28 http://www.cepolicy.org/publications/anatomy-info-war-how-russias-propaganda-machine-works-and-how-counter-it
29 http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/may/14/russia-nato-twenty-feet-from-war/
30 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-26/provocation-nato-conducts-military-maneuvers-300-yards-russias-border
31 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-25/out-my-face-please-why-are-us-soldiers-mariupol
