I am pretty angry. All of the Middle East’s recent deaths, the 1,400 Israelis, and the 11,000 Palestinians, were preventable. It probably won’t surprise anybody much that I think it all ties back to the US Military Industrial Complex. There’s plenty of horror to go around this month, but one aspect that I think people are missing, is the way that Israel and Palestine’s catastrophe has allowed the MIC to conquer another US president. Todays’ video covers Joe Biden’s fall, as well as most of the rest of the history of the 21st century. Let me know what you think…
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Video Transcript after the jump…
So you guys know that US foreign policy is a monstrous fraud right? For 20 years Washington DC has been lying to the American public to steal money from us to make the world more dangerous, and then they tell us we have to give them more money for weapons, because the world is so scary. Washington DC has just completed it’s victory over another US president. Let’s get into it.
The basic lie is simple, obvious, and almost never challenged. Washington, DC wants to convince us that the United States is in some kind of danger. We are not in any danger, we just arent. This is a country bordered by two oceans and two countries, Canada and Mexico, whose main agendas are further subordinating their economies to ours. We are the only country in the world that is capable of self-sufficiency, and we don’t just have all the resources and technology needed for modern life, we invented most of it. We naturally run the world. and if we don’t actively go out and fuck with the world, people automatically love us, because we also invented modern marketing, and happen to have a really appealing basic ideology. We will let anybody come here and call themselves American. In fact we usually encourage it. Very few other places do that. If we just left the world alone, we could sit back and watch our power grow decade by decade as the world’s best and brightest kept making their way here.
The problem is that about 80 years ago we created a massive military machine to crush our last two serious rivals, the Germans and the Japanese. And we spent forty years after that crushing the Soviet Union, which was really only as powerful as it was because we had built it up to fight the Germans in world war II. After 80 years this massive military machine we built owns most congresspeople, most US universities, and almost all of the media. We are still a free country, but the trillion+ dollars we spend on the military every year deeply corrupts all the news and analysis of the outside world that we receive.
So why is military spending so important to Washington DC? Let me answer this question with a clip from one of my favorite videos from last year.
“The primary mission of the US government throughout this century has been selling weapons. The defense industry is a surprisingly small part of the US economy, but it’s the most important part to Washington DC, because it’s a business that is entirely government controlled. There’s a lot more money in tech, energy, finance and other sectors, but those parts of the economy are unpredictable and vulnerable to Competition and markets. With the defense industry ,Congress has complete control and endless opportunities for corruption, so DC’s highest priority is always keeping wars going, and scaring the US public enough to keep defense budgets high.”
We American tax payers let this happen, because we are so secure. What happens in Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel is honestly a lot less important to our daily lives than whatever new TV show is on Netflix or HBO. The problem is that the experts we have signed our world management over to, want more money, so they have to scare us. So they make the world worse. That’s the basic fraud at the heart of US foreign policy.
A great example of this would be 9-11. The US had won the cold war by the 1950s. It was only an escalating series of US mistakes, chiefly Vietnam, that kept the Soviets looking at all viable. One of these mistakes was Saudi Arabia, a Medieval Monarchy with a gross corruption of Islamic ideology that the US foreign policy establishment heavily supported, up to and beyond the point that that ideology created a smoking crater in lower Manhattan. To get justice for 9-11, we didn’t even have to attack Saudi Arabia, we just had to stop propping it up and let it fall. That would have made a much better, much safer world. But that’s not what Washington DC wants. So they did this nonsense instead.
“States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.
North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility towards America and to support Terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade.
States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”
The only moral, correct and just thing to do after 9-11 was stop supporting Saudi Arabia, but that wouldn’t give Washington DC anything to do, so they ludicrously attempted to knit together a few weak besieged regimes into some kind of conspiracy they could use our military against. Let’s take a look at how that went huh?
Well first there is North Korea, a batshit little despotism that in 2002 was dependent on a Clinton era deal with the United States to feed itself. The deal was that we gave them access to enough trade and money to barely sustain the country and in return they wouldn’t go nuclear. Bush’s tough guys ended that program in 2002, called North Korea evil, and by 2006 North Korea became a nuclear power we could never conquer, but would always have to buy weapons to potentially fight. Big success for the weapons companies, and nobody else.
Iran had been desperately trying to come in from the cold since the early 1990s. They invited US oil companies back in during the Clinton administration, but the military industrial complex refused to let one of their last and most lucrative enemies make peace and killed the deal. After 9-11 Iran was instrumental in helping the US take Afghanistan, hoping that they could ally with Washington DC against Sunni terror. Instead Bush called them evil, and then handed them Iraq on a silver platter.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been utterly crushed in the early 1990s, and was desperate for whatever crumbs the international community was willing to give them. Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the United States, or anybody other than his own people, but the Bushies were desperate to show what the US military could do. They sure showed us, killing 600,000 Iraqis to build a country where most people are still worse off than they were under Saddam.
Oh, and it’s also worth mentioning, in light of recent events, that the Bush losers gave Gaza to Hamas as well. They pushed an election in 2006 that brought Hamas to power. Appalled at what they did, the Bush Administration then ended Palestinian democracy by funding and arming a civil war that permanently split the Palestinian Authority, and gave Hamas the excuse to take full dictatorial control of Gaza in 2007. They’ve been there ever since, with horrific results.
Bush also tripled Mexico’s murder rate through an ill advised militarization of the drug war and restarted the war in Somalia. He was a busy guy.
It’s customary and sane to look at the Bush era as a horrific failure. But I am afraid that Washington DC sees the Bush era as the good old days. They are still following Bush’s playbook. And they get angry when US presidents don’t want to follow that playbook.
DC takes regimes and conflicts that need a few million dollars of diplomacy and turns them into sources of trillions of dollars of profit for weapons companies.
That’s a key thing to understand about the fraud perpetrated by the US foreign policy establishment. The world absolutely is getting more dangerous. So it’s tempting to say, oh well, better give the Pentagon more money. But it’s hyper militarized US foreign policy that makes the world more dangerous, and the more money we give them, the worse the world will get.
Bush was a pure avatar of evil and destruction, making ruin everywhere he went, while spouting Christian platitudes. But every president since Bush has tried to work against his legacy. They have all failed, miserably.
US presidents are still, just barely, accountable to the people. And the past three presidents could see the wreckage Bush had made, and that continuously pouring trillions down that black hole was in no way in the interest of the American people. Barack Obama was the first to try and fail to fix the damage.
Obama did many horrible things. Destroying Libya wrecked North Africa for a decade. Creating a wide open field for Jihadis in northern Syria gave us ISIS which then required bombing cities to rubble to stamp ISIS out. He allowed Saudi Arabia’s ridiculous and failed invasion of Yemen. Obama supported the overthrow of a democratically elected president of Ukraine in 2014, prompting a Russian invasion. All of these things provided massive cash infusions to Washington DC and the defense contractors that own it. Obama told himself that if he did these things, and kept US troops out of it, he could finally make peace with Iran and begin to extricate us from the Middle East. That was a good idea and a noble effort, but it was always likely to fail. Washington DC was barely honoring the deal, long before Trump killed it.
Most people in Washington DC will agree with me that Obama was a failure in Foreign Policy, but it’s not because of all the countries he destroyed Washington DC hates Obama because he didn’t destroy enough. The biggest complaint they have against him is that he didn’t ruinously invade Syria the way Bush invaded Iraq. That may sound insane, but that’s what every serious foreign policy expert is saying when they complain about Obama’s refusal to back up his red line in Syria.
Donald Trump became president for a lot of bad reasons, but for one very good one. He was the only Presidential candidate this century who told the truth about what Washington DC has done to the world, and done to the US taxpayer
“We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to the Middle East, we have done a tremendous disservice to humanity, the people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory. It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the four trillion dollars, or five trillion dollars. I wish it were spent right here in the United States on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports that are all falling apart.”
Unfortunately, Donald Trump was also Donald Trump, a monster of self regard, a reality television star pretending to be a businessman who was obviously utterly incapable of running the US government. The military industrial complex ran rings around him.
While we all watched the Trump show in horror, the US foreign policy establishment openly changed its focus, away from its massively failed war on terror, to starting wars with Russia and China, which were the fights the Pentagon had wanted all along anyway.
This isn’t some conspiracy theory, it’s in the 2018 national security strategy, which openly shifted us towards “Great Power Competition”. Bush’s national security state failures had become our resistance heroes against Trump so nobody questioned it. Ukraine is now paying the price for that, and Taiwan will likely do so before long as well.
China and Russia were ready for great power competition as well, not because of some inherent evil or lust for empire, but because of 15 solid years of US aggression. Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and their systems, spent the 1990s and 2000s tying themselves in knots to try to fit into the US system. By 2015, NATO Expansion and the US militarization of Asia had made it damn clear that Russia and China would never be accepted by the US as equals.
There’s key part of this that always gets neglected. Washington, DC pretends that Russia and China just decided to be evil one day. This entirely neglects the US’s two decades destruction of the Middle East and North Africa, which involved the steamrolling of a lot of Russian and Chinese interests. We made it damn clear that the world’s most powerful country would accept no peaceful rivalry. Russia and China are more hostile today, but that’s self defense on their part, not aggression. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unforgivable, but he learned it from watching us.
Trump was one of the weakest presidents in US history. He ordered that US troops be taken out of Syria at least three times. He was ignored. The newest issue of the Atlantic Monthly has a cover article celebrating Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who worked with thousands of others to routinely violate the orders of our democratically elected Commander in Chief. Some of those orders probably were worth ignoring, but that shouldn’t make you any less worried about the US constitution.
Domestically the main effect of the Trump administration was to turn whatever was left of our “liberal media” into enthusiastic militarists. Abroad, in spite of, in part because of Trump’s friendly rhetoric, US attempts to destroy Russia went in to overdrive.
Under Trump, All attempts at a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine crisis were abandoned. The US started sanctioning any country that bought weapons from Russia, a country that is vastly more dependent on its military industrial complex than we are. And we started massively arming up Ukraine. Putin’s horrific invasion is inexcusable. But it’s not hard to see why he thought he had no other choice.
Biden presented a new opportunity for peace. Unlike Trump and Obama, he had decades of experience of Washington DC. He had experienced decades of lying generals, all the way back to the Vietnam era, and much more recently with the failed Afghanistan surge he had opposed in the early Obama years. He had the experience and the Congress wrangling skills he needed to beat the military industrial complex.
In his first year Joe Biden got to work. He finally ended our misbegotten 20 year adventure in Afghanistan in 2021. It’s the only truly heroic act by a US president I can think of this century. And the US media murdered his presidency for it.
Instead of focusing on 20 years of failure or the generals’ near treasonous refusal to prepare for an orderly withdrawal that two presidents had ordered, the military industrial complex media made Biden the bad guy. This smear campaign successfully drove Biden’s approval ratings down to Trump levels, and they have never really recovered.
The constant accusations of wimpiness and cowardice meant that Biden was incapable of engaging with Russia in any meaningful way. The Democratic base wanted Russian blood, and Putin and Biden delivered, with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians caught in the crossfire.
Biden handled this war he probably didn’t want admirably well, despite his flagging popularity and fading capacities. I think his steady hand on the escalation levers has probably kept us out of World War III. But he’s also overseen a massive US remilitarizarion of Europe that will probably last a generation.
Biden kept on trying to reach out diplomatically, to China and the global south. He had failed to keep Europe out of war, but with expanded global outreach, perhaps he could keep us out of war with Iran and China. He did this in ways both very positive and deeply misguided. His quiet ending or at least slowing down of most of Obama’s drone wars was a great gift to a generation of the world’s poorest people who had learned to fear death from the skies. The US media and most of Congress tied his hands with Iran, but by backing off Trump’s program of piracy against Iranian oil he made peace look possible. These were good things. Biden’s attempt to continue Trump’s absurd Abraham Accords policy was not a good thing. In fact, as we now know it was catastrophic. Making deals with Arab autocrats to sideline the Palestinians backfired horrifically.
And it’s with that horrific Palestinian revenge, and Israel’s apocalyptic response that I think we can stop talking about Joe Biden as any kind of improvement. The Military Industrial Complex has conquered another US president.
Biden’s moral and humane victory over the international drone war has been wiped out in just a month of Israeli bombing. The US sponsored piles of dead women and children are centralized in one country now, but that just makes them easier to see. Biden’s pretensions of humanitarian leadership have been squashed by his firm support for an Israeli government that is openly lobbying for ethnic cleansing. Biden’s complete surrender to US Empire’s fraud was symbolized by a speech he gave a few weeks back, that fell all the way down to George W. Bush’s level.
“It’s sick. Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common, they both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy, completely annihilate it.”
The absurdity of the Axis of Evil speech was the fact that Bush tried to staple together a bunch of regimes that had nothing to do with each other, and he totally got away with it. But at least all three of Bush’s countries were nation-states.
Biden’s attempt to put a separatist group within one of our client states on the same level as the faded imperial power that is Russia goes beyond absurdity to obscenity. There’s a serious danger that the population of Gaza will be ethnically cleansed by a vastly superior military force in the coming months. A US president attempting to put Gaza’s gross little quasi government on the same level as Putin’s neo-imperial nuclear power makes the horrific possibility of genocide much more real. Bush’s Axis of Evil speech was a catastrophe. But we could at least be confident that his targeted countries would still exist when the US military Industrial Complex was done with them. Biden has taken Bush’s rhetorical absurdity and added a slice of potential genocide to it. Frankly it’s nauseating.
As with Obama, and even Trump, it’s possible to have some sympathy for Biden’s defeat by Washington DC’s great fraud. All three men tried, but all three were utterly defeated by a Congress, a media, and legions of lobbyists that are wholly owned by the US arms industry. We can be sympathetic, but that does not mean we can stop fighting.
Because after breaking the world, and crushing their third president in a row Washington DC is now coming for the American people. Again, this isn’t a conspiracy theory, this has been explicitly laid out in the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Robert Gates is maybe the most respected and influential man in US foreign policy. When Bush realized he needed one of Daddy’s cold warriors to clean up his mess he looked to Gates in 2006. He is seen as a very bipartisan figure, because Obama kept him on as Secretary of Defense for a couple of years. Because media and government lie to us constantly, the Iraq and Afghanistan surges that Gates oversaw are still seen as successes.
So Gates isn’t just seen as a bipartisan foreign policy figure, he’s seen as a successful one, and those are in very short supply in the United States. Gates is maybe the most influential guy in the military industrial complex and In his recent foreign policy manifesto, he declared war on the American people. Specifically your parents and grandparents.
It’s this article that convinced me I needed to make this video. Gates does a decent job of describing some of the ways the world has gotten more dangerous. But in the true Washington, DC fraud style, he completely leaves out US responsibility. He claims that what we really need is to dump another trillion dollars a year into the US military spending that has done so much to make the world more dangerous. And how should we pay for it? By strip mining Medicare and Social security, robbing the American people of what little social safety net we have.
This Robert Gates article made me so angry that I dedicated two episodes of the podcast to it. You can find those episodes on Spotify and Apple podcasts now, and on our other YouTube channel in a few weeks time.
Today I’ve attempted to lay out the true history of the past two decades and what Washington DC has done to the world. The worst thing about all this is that none of it is necessary. 80 years ago, US military victory gave the world a chance at peace. I still believe that US military power is a necessary part of maintaining that peace. But it’s US military hyperactivity, and the many frauds necessary to maintain that hyperactivity, that is doing the most to threaten world peace. It’s the very definition of a Tragedy.