Can’t You See War On The Horizon?

Paul Craig Roberts:

According to news reports in the British press, Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed Russia’s industries to prepare themselves to be able to make a quick switch to war production. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vladimir-putin-russia-business-war-production-sochi-military-talks-a8069951.html

Clearly, the Russian government would not make such an announcement unless it was convinced that the prospect of war with the West was real. For some time I have emphasized in my columns that the consequence of years of hostile actions taken by Washington and its European vassals against Russia was leading to war.

It is easy to understand that the massive US military/security complex needs a convincing enemy in order to justify its enormous budget, that the crazed neoconservatives put their fantasy ideology of US world hegemony above the life of the planet, and that Hillary and the Democratic National Committee will do anything to overturn Trump’s presidential victory. However, it is difficult to understand why the European political leaders are willing to put their countries at risk for Washington’s benefit.

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How Trump Will Betray His Base

Tomgram: Rajan Menon, | TomDispatch:

If you want a gauge of the state of America, the country that put billionaire Donald Trump in the White House, consider this: the three richest Americans -- Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett -- now have the wealth of the bottom half of the U.S. population, or 160 million Americans.  Or consider this: the 2016 Wall Street bonus pool, as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich pointed out recently, was larger than the yearly earnings of “all 3.3 million Americans working full time at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.”  And keep in mind that the Trump-Republican tax “reform” bill, if passed, will only make such figures more mind-boggling. It will assumedly send so much more money cascading upward that the copious funding of future 1% elections will be guaranteed for our “democratic” lifetimes.

And if anyone was in doubt about the nature of Donald Trump’s “populism,” he answered that question within weeks of his election when he began appointing the wealthiest cabinet in American history.  It was already clear by then who he really thought the “forgotten men and women of this country” were: former Goldman Sachs partners with at least a few hundred million dollars in their pockets.  In this new Gilded Age (in which, I suspect, disparities in wealth may actually become worse than in the nineteenth century version of the same), isn’t it time to stop talking about “trickle down economics” and come up with some new phrase?  Gusher economics?  We certainly need something that comes closer to capturing the realities of a moment in which, for instance, that tax bill will offer a staggering one-half of its cuts to the top 1% while, as Robert Borosage writes in the Nation, “raising taxes on families earning $10,000-$75,000 over the next decade” and even eliminating a tax credit that incentivizes employers to hire disabled veterans.

With that in mind, TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon takes a clear-eyed look at the populism of the Trumpian moment, the growing inequality that is increasingly the heart and soul of this society, and what is(n’t) being done about it. Tom

Twenty-First-Century American Populism 

Or Putting Your Mouth Where Your Money Isn’t 

By Rajan Menon

Among the stranger features of the 2016 election campaign was the success of Donald Trump, a creature of globalization, as an America First savior of the white working class. A candidate who amassed billions of dollars by playing globalization for all it was worth -- he manufactured clothes and accessories bearing his name in low-wage economies and invested in corporations eager to outsource -- won over millions of voters by promising to keep jobs here in the U.S.

Admittedly, only a third of his voters earned less than $50,000 a year and cultural and racial resentment, not just economic grievances, drove many of them to Trump.  Still, in an ever more economically unequal America, his populist economic message resonated. It helped him win the presidency by peeling off white working class votes in key regions, particularly the industrial Midwest. Now, he’s stuck with his populist narrative, and here’s the problem for him: it’s not likely to work -- not given the economic realities of this planet, not for long anyway.

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Is The Left Self-Destructing, Or Is Something Else Going On?

SHTFplan:

The temptation to revel in the implosion of the extreme political Left is high, and it’s understandable. I could go through a long list of insane offenses by the cultural Marxist cult of the church of “social justice,” but I think this latest example summarizes the problem nicely. In this video, teaching assistant Lindsay Shepard at Wilfred Laurier University in Canada is reprimanded and brow beaten by two professors for daring to commit the heresy of showing her students BOTH sides of the debate over transgenderism and pronoun politics.

The zealotry on display here by these professors is indicative of a deep-rooted cancer within the Left. Shepard was not attempting to troll her class with misinformation or subtly manipulate them with propaganda, in fact she wasn’t seeking to pressure them to support either viewpoint. She was not violating anyone’s private property rights to assail them with her arguments, either. Her only goal was to show people in a public space that there are in fact at least two opposing viewpoints on the issue in question. But in a cult it is unacceptable to acknowledge that there are different ways of thinking from the prevailing doctrine. Other beliefs and evidence must be filtered out completely, otherwise, the devout members of the cult might be faced with uncertainty.

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A Video Game Analogy to Our Energy Predicament

Our Finite World:

The way the world economy is manipulated by world leaders is a little like a giant video game. The object of the game is to keep the world economy growing, without too many adverse consequences to particular members of the world economy. We represent this need for growth of the world economy as being similar to making a jet airplane fly at ever-higher altitudes.

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Rising China Signals Historic Power Transition

The American Conservative:

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump stopped in Beijing to meet with his “friend,” Chinese President Xi Jinping. At the top of Trump’s agenda was persuading Xi to tighten the economic screws on North Korea, in order to compel Pyongyang to give up all its nuclear weapons. There is nothing inherently wrong with the leaders of great powers developing cordial relations with their counterparts—as long as they bear in mind the dictum of the great 19th-century British statesman Lord Palmerston, who famously said that great powers do not have permanent friends. Instead, they have permanent interests.

Warm personal relationships between leaders may matter at the margins of policy, but national interest always prevails over friendship in determining a state’s foreign policy goals. It’s unclear whether President Trump understands this, or, even more importantly, the reasons why Chinese and U.S. interests clash on some important issues—not least North Korea.

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Elizabeth Warren's “Native American” Hoax

Town Hall - Ashley Herzog:

Whether it's 23andMe or Ancestry.com, the proliferation of genetic testing kits is posing a real problem for the race-obsessed.

Last summer, Salon.com published an amusing article titled “Let’s enjoy the white supremacist freakout after DNA tests show they aren’t 100 percent white.”

“Many users on the white nationalist website Stormfront posted their results from genetic ancestry company 23andMe, and were unpleasantly surprised to discover that they weren't as white as they thought,” the author, Michael Glassman, wrote.

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A Look at the Islamic State's Infiltration of a Syrian Air Base

Stratfor Worldview:

Imagery acquired by Stratfor working with its partners at AllSource Analysis illustrates the damage inflicted by an Islamic State infiltration attack on the Syrian loyalist air base at Deir el-Zour. A relief force recently reached the base and the Deir el-Zour garrison, which had endured more than three years of siege by the Islamic State. As can be seen from the attack, however, the Islamic State still maintains the capability to inflict damage and carry out attacks in the region even as it has technically ceased to control territory around Deir el-Zour and its airbase.

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