Exasperation

COLD WAR TWO

EASTERN AMBITION MEETS WESTERN HYPOCRISY

 Everyone’s Prestige Is Imperiled!

Who Was Wrong First?

 
The dogs of war hear a distant trumpet.

Despite denials by the president and congress that a new cold war is the present agenda, the United States and Russia are re-engaged in the conflict that put the world on the edge of an atomic abyss for four decades.

A whole generation of Americans practiced cowering beneath school desks after the blinding, scorching flare of a nuclear blast. “Duck and cover” was a sick joke.

When the US and Soviet Union stood toe-to-toe with hydrogen bomb-tipped missiles over Cuba in 1962, many believed that we were converging on Armageddon.

We know now that the Soviet general in Cuba with 40,000 hidden troops had authority to nuke the U.S. Sixth Fleet if we marines had invaded. The world came that close to an all-out nuclear war.

Territory, military security, markets, status, and ideology were reasons for the standoff then, and the same factors apply to the new cold war; especially and most-importantly status.  The “international order” is at stake.

Isn’t this another way of saying that a US conception of international order is at stake? Status is at stake. Profits are at stake. Prestige is at stake. Military hardware and ordinance profits are at stake. “Leadership” is at stake.

Nearly unnoticed in this on-going drama is the documented fact that the oil industry has discovered 4 trillion cubic feet of shale gas beneath Ukraine and wants to export fracking technology there.

Environmentalists, please listen up.

To the players and Principals the world is at stake; and it is. Their conception and acceptance of the world is. But they play a dice game with the world, and countries like Ukraine, Kosovo, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Baltic States are mere chips in the great resource game; their inhabitants little more than demographic statistics.

How many millions of consumers are necessary to consume X barrels of crude oil? How many toilets and sewers will be needed and how many rent-able houses and apartments? How much electricity? Water? Thousands of analysts study these questions about the future of not only humanity but the world; the planet that does not in the end belong only to us. But the main aim of all these experts is how to best exploit every available resource, natural, human, or animal, for the greatest profit for certain individuals. 

President Obama in Brussels failed to justify America’s invasions of Kosovo and Iraq as answer to Vladimir Putin’s charge of hypocrisy about invading sovereign countries. Obama said that we have left Iraq and are exiting Afghanistan. (He said nothing truthful about the condition we have left poor Iraq in.)

Obama lied when he said that the U.S. did not profit from Iraq’s oil. American and British oil interests certainly benefited in some way; or why did they support invasion in the first place?

The primary reason for all the latest wars is energy. Everybody needs more and more of it. It is pricey. Selling it harvests huge profits for private individuals who are not like you and me. They are very well bloody rich. They walk on air or fly through it at amazing speeds. They own more than accountants can account for. They never seem to have enough. They are insatiable. 

Sometimes they slaughter millions to have their way with oil and water and any other kind of energy  resource that buys the latest in yachts and penthouses. They build dams and pipelines and own companies that supply them. They buy politicians and kings like Imelda Marcos bought shoes. They control stock markets and employ millions to juggle their basically unbalanced criminal enterprise: governments. They own mines and ships and dams and spaceports. They think that they own Earth.

But Earth grumbles under Los Angeles and spits fire in Indonesia.

The bad news is that they govern.

The good news is that they die like everyone else. Sooner or later we will be rid of them.

But in the meanwhile we need a Congressional investigation of who made a fortune from that stupid, tragic war, which set Iraqi development back decades, killing and wounding millions. 

Hospitals, bridges, electricity lines and transformers, public buildings, highways, water mains and pump stations, schools, markets, mosques, private homes, and whole neighborhoods were destroyed by the illegal and immoral Iraq War. The oil fields were protected though.

A whole generation of Iraqi youth now must endure lifelong physical and mental trauma from having been born into a world of bombs, murder, bullets, torture, and hatred that resulted from a US-taxpayer-funded war that killed more than a million and de-stabilized the whole Middle East. These youths have been denied adequate education and health care and as a result of injustice now are prime recruits for a war of terror, blood-for-blood, eye for eye. And Americans will be whining, "What did we do to deserve this?"

This is a fact that we should never forget: every war that the United States has warred against sovereign or revolutionary nations has intended to set back and impede modern and therefore human development: Vietnam, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, among others, prove this assertion. Iraq is no exception. 

U.S. capitalists do not want such countries to develop independence, not even and especially not democracy, and join the international competition, make more costly or deny US market-penetration. 

The primary impulse for the U.S. Constitution and codification of laws was to create stability in markets with lawful international and domestic guarantees for contracts; treaties with the force of law. Business is business and business is what America is all about. Even in the Mafia, "It's only business." (Don't be offended as I proceed to blow your head off.) 

Ours is a bullying capitalist imperialism as our economic foes have long maintained. (But they became gangsters too.) However, the American version of capitalism dominates the world. Our dollar is still the standard form of payment. Opposed to the American capitalist ideal is its opposite, communism. But American capitalist-imperialists are more afraid of nationalism than communism, and there are other variations of national-capitalism which do not seem as low and mean as our stingy version. In France, for example, every worker gets a paid one-month vacation every year. All other advanced nations have free or affordable health care for everyone. 

Nationalism itself is a bog of self-interested and contradictory entities, and in the end, as the Highlander said, "There can be only one!" Therefore all other nations must be less than one. Nationalism and capitalism together are fouling and wasting the earth and impoverishing the future. Air, water, space, and animal life recognize no man-made laws or boundaries, however strict and durable. Nations are like businesses with millions of underpaid workers, struggling against one another like crippled cyclops, wielding crude spears and axes of an economic system that benefits only the ruthless rich, leaving everybody else poor or just making the rent.

No wonder that in America "internationalism" is practically a capital crime. (It is a crime against Capital.)

What is Capital? I don't know, read the book. 

President Obama blithely ignored the fact that Iraq was stuck in a world of shit when US forces departed, and the president lied brazenly when he implied that he had opposed invading Iraq. As a senator he voted for it and reversed on the issue only when the war was plainly a debacle and his quest for the White House was steaming full-ahead. Popular opinion by then opposed the Iraq War . 

As much as I like President Barack Obama personally, I won't ignore these bold lies.

Americans clearly opposed the war from the start but the war-loving, sensationalist, and under-educated Media swayed them to tentative and temporary support, asserted in polls, which evaporated when the mists of memory cleared, the graves multiplied, and the simple logic of arithmetic re-asserted itself. We spent how much to kill how many for what now? Say that again? What did we get out of it? Duh!

Watching the present tragedy unfold is a tiring déjà vu. Here we go again. We have been here before. Each time it seems that scarce funds might be freed by a conclusion to the latest war, freed to pay for solutions to domestic problems, another war “breaks out,” diverting or preventing spending, preventing even discussion of important laws or regulations, putting them on the back burner. The problem of coastal flooding by rising sea levels gets low-priority, for example.

The situation becomes urgent and a 24-hour news cycle gears up with the same old, boring, talking-heads, so as to make the American public anxious and compliantly cheering the thrumming of the drums of war. But in the end it is only a spectator sport. A lot of know-nothing, dumb-ass Americans sitting in easy chairs before brainwashing televisions, gorging food, swigging beer, smoking dope, and pretending knowledge they don’t possess: The New Know-Nothings.

Welcome to this Season’s Feature:

THE NEW COLD WAR

CHAPTER ONE

Ukraine Crisis!
(Most popular show in Texas)