Us Foreign Policy 24
Dictator of the World
Dictator of the World
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In his July 4 speech to Congress in 1821, U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams said that if the United States were to abandon its then non-interventionist foreign policy, it would inevitably become the “dictatorship” of the world and begin to behave accordingly.
Political scientist Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of the “Future of Freedom” foundation, wrote on May 10 of last year that he finished a major journalistic work entitled “The Dictatorship of the World” in which he wrote that it cannot be denied that that prediction of J.Q. Adams has become a reality.
The United States has truly become the dictatorship of the world, an arrogant, ruthless and brutal dictatorship that tolerates no dissent from anyone on earth.
“I use the term America now because that’s what Adams originally used, but in reality, it’s the United States government that has become the dictatorship of the world,” says Hornberger. A good example of this phenomenon occurred when, at the beginning of the last century, the world’s dictatorship applied its cruel system of sanctions against Cuba with vengeful ends and has maintained it to this day.
It is unfair enough to punish innocent foreign citizens with death or impoverishment for the sake of a political objective. But it is also important to note that the sanctions are an attack on the economic freedom of the American people because they involve sanctions against the American citizens involved.
If an American trades with an Iranian, a Cuban or a Venezuelan, the world’s dictator threatens, pursues and convicts him or her with vindictive intent, through criminal prosecution, civil fines, or both.
A similar system of sanctions has been applied during the 1990s against Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children from the Arab world. The sanctions were.
That did not bother the dictator, at least not enough to end those sanctions. The idea was that if a large enough number of children could be killed, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein would either abdicate in favor of a U.S.-approved dictator, or there would be a coup d’état or violent revolution that would accomplish the same thing.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright expressed the dictatorship’s official view when she announced that the death of half a million Iraqi children from sanctions “was worth it”.
Another example of this was the case of Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese citizen working as the financial director of the giant Chinese technology company Huawei. After being arrested by Canadian authorities and placed under house arrest, she suffered the wrath of the world’s dictatorship.
What was her alleged crime? Having violated US sanctions against Iran? What do US sanctions against Iran have to do with China? Exactly nothing! She’s a Chinese citizen, not an American. Then why was she being prosecuted by the United States government?
Sanctions have become a regular tool of US foreign policy. Hardly anyone cares about their imposition and enforcement. Their aim is to threaten foreign entities and citizens with death, suffering and economic deprivation. Its goal is to bend their governments to the will of the American dictator and her violent and brutal agents.
What could be more violent and ruthless than threatening innocent people with death and impoverishment as a way of reaching their governments? It is well known that most citizens of the world have little control over the actions of their governments,. U.S. citizens have little control over the actions of their government. What is the morality in punishing innocent citizens as a way of achieving a political objective? That is precisely why terrorism is condemned.
Washington is not content to demand that its citizens comply with its evil system. In its role as global dictator, the federal government requires everyone to comply with its evil system. The dictatorship claims world jurisdiction for itself.
Why are innocent foreign citizens the target of death and economic suffering simply because the
Why do U.S. officials not like their government? Why are the freedoms of U.S. citizens being destroyed for the same reason? And why are foreign citizens around the world criminally prosecuted for violating the federal government’s evil penalty system?
December 25, 2019.
John Bolton Has Fallen
Bolton Has Fallen, but Not the Mother Who Gave Birth to Him
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Cunning, stubborn and politically dangerous… Thus the foreign policy analyst, columnist of the British news agency Reuters, Daniel R. DePetris, describes the firing of the murky multiple killer in the politics of the United States John Bolton, announced yesterday by his boss, the no less murky Donald Trump, president of the United States of America.
“John Bolton is just the opposite of what a presidential national security adviser should be. He is as stubborn as a rhinoceros, as cunning as a snake, and as dangerous as a scorpion. Bolton’s is an extreme, black and white view of the world: if you’re not an ally of the United States, you’re an adversary who needs a boot on his neck in the form of military force or economic sanctions.
“The second and third order strategic consequences are no obstacle to Bolton. Why go through the humiliating spectacle of negotiating when you can simply bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities or violently end Kim Jong-un’s “regime” by force?
“Diplomacy, after all, is for the weak, the State Department bureaucrats and the appeasers. If the boss insists on diplomacy, then advise him to demand the moon, the stars and everything else rather than offering a bargaining chip in the form of relief from sanctions.
John Bolton made his career by acting as a wrecker of arms control agreements and, indeed, of agreements of any kind. Before joining the Trump administration as national security advisor, Bolton was, for a brief time, ambassador to the United Nations and undersecretary of state for arms control. There, he attempted to remove an intelligence analyst for not agreeing with his position on Cuba’s alleged biological weapons program.
When the president asked Bolton to serve as his national security adviser last year, it generated many concerns and much confusion because Trump and Bolton could not have had more fundamental disagreements on foreign policy. Although both made fun of the United Nations, as well as international organizations in general, and had divergent views on some of the most important issues on the agenda, Bolton would prefer to attack Iran rather than have any dialogue with its leaders. This was an alternative that Trump has said on numerous occasions that he would be more than happy to consider (at the next meeting of the UN General Assembly, for example).
As for Venezuela, Trump seems to have regretted trying to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, when Bolton was attacking Caracas as part of a “troika of tyranny”. Bolton’s obsession with unilaterally denuclearizing North Korea – an approach that weighed on Trump during his second summit with Kim Jong-un in February – is far more likely to lead to the end of diplomacy than to the end of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. (If ever there was one).
Trump got tired of Bolton in the same way he got tired of other members of his closest staff: Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly were all convenient to the president at one point, only to be abruptly fired or convinced to resign.
Bolton, as thorny as a porcupine in dealing with his colleagues, had long been strained in relations with Trump. NBC News reported that the two men had a screaming fight behind closed doors the night before Bolton’s resignation.
Trump said he will announce the name of his new national security adviser next week, and the corridors in Washington are already filled with speculation.
According to DePetris, Trump needs an adviser who is willing to engage in pragmatic negotiations and is prepared for an uncomfortable but necessary negotiations. He needs someone to help him end the wars that have continued aimlessly and purposelessly. You need someone to hold members of the administration accountable when they refuse to implement the policy once it is approved by the agencies.
All this will be easier with Bolton off the team.
But Humanity has no illusions. In the Oval Office of the White House there are many other falcons almost as cruel and ruthless as this one to advise the Falcon-in-Chief. But there has undoubtedly been a respite.
September 11, 2019.
This article can be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
Washington Confirmed as Terrorist
Washington Confirmed as Terrorist
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Shortly after the Venezuelan government denounced the huge blackouts in March that were caused by cyber and electromagnetic attacks, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order paving the way for his country’s critical infrastructure to be investigated and defended against foreign electromagnetic pulse offensives.
The initiative took many by surprise, as electromagnetic pulse weapons (EMPs) look like something from the movies rather than real threats.
Since 2001, the US Congress has been evaluating the possible risks of an EMP attack against the US through a Commission made up of scientists, engineers and corporate operators intimately linked to the structure of the Defense Department and private contractors linked to the military-industrial complex.
The reports produced by the Commission study a high altitude EMP attack (the so-called Rainbow Bomb), capable of producing a blackout with power similar to a lightning discharge (50 thousand volts per meter) and the explosion of an atomic bomb about 700 kilometers above the target.
Also mentioned are small-scale EMP weapons, with the ability to damage specific areas such as the electrical system, telecommunications, banking and finance, the oil and gas industry, transportation, food and water infrastructure, and security and emergency services, as well as those of any country’s government.
The Commission’s first executive report was published in 2004 with fairly general considerations on the possible consequences of the Rainbow Bomb on the US. The in which the EMP attack is described there as a “terrorist activity” that uses a small number of nuclear weapons to produce a catastrophic impact on society.
The electronic and electrical collapse scenarios are neatly described, and related to some natural and man-made disasters that have had similar effects in recent North American history.
With the same vehemence with which the U.S. is concerned about electromagnetic attacks, which it claims is imminent, the Venezuelan government denounces the possibility of an EMP attack against the Simón Bolívar Hydroelectric Plant system in Guri.
The report emphasizes the fact that the U.S. electricity grid is deeply connected to all activities of society and the economy, as in many other parts of the world (including Venezuela). In the US, load distribution is divided into three, with the (oil) state of Texas being the backbone of a network with 300 million dependent users.
This means that a modest alteration to the electrical system can cause a functional collapse, with catastrophic consequences.
As it was denounced with respect to the attack against the Guri Hydroelectric Plant, the United States maintains that the electrical network of its country could be attacked “using information of the operations in the control systems”, that is to say, there must be internal hand that assists the terrorist operation.
Such is the capacity of a small EMP weapon that, without the use of the Rainbow Bomb, an attack on a precise target in the U.S. electrical system could take place that would leave 70% of its territory without light in the blink of an eye.
In fact, the Commission admits that a small EMP attack can wreak electrical and electronic havoc similar to those left by Hurricane Katrina (2005), which left some 4 million people without light in some 233,000 km² (989961.8029 square miles) of the US, an area equivalent to that of the UK.
The anti-chavista media have ridiculed the denunciations of cybernetic and electromagnetic attacks in Venezuela, which shows either ignorance about the new tendencies of the military industry with these technologies in the context of a new “cold war”, or that they operate as bleachers of information and scenario before some consumers of news without any critical reading of the facts.
Neither the Commission formed in 2001 nor Trump’s recent Executive Order had been interested in these weapons, either because of their own vulnerabilities or because of their future offensive prospects.
But the arms race and the technological development between powers is currently going through this arms scheme that sounds like science fiction films. And this armament industry is part of a much more current dimension than those shown by Hollywood.
July 29, 2019
This article can be reproduced citing the newspaper POR ESTO! as source.
Trumps’s Imperialist Policy Tools
Trumps’s Imperialist Policy Tools
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Donald Trump’s foreign policy is largely based on the use of the tools at the Empire’s disposal: economic terrorism, threats of war, diplomatic pressure, trade wars, etc. But by resorting to them, Washington isolates itself internationally from its traditional allies and raises tensions on the world chessboard to an unprecedented level.
This is how Professor Federico Pieraccini sees it in an essay published on May 25 by the Strategic Foundation entitled Shielding the World From US Chaos Is No Easy Task.
The blockade against Cuba has been maintained for 60 years, with more or less intense stages of sharpening, together with threats of war against Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of Korea, Syria and Iran that are repeated daily, economic sanctions involving tariffs are, in many ways, comparable to declarations of war, and can be directed against friendly countries or allies of the United States.
China and Russia fight by diplomatic, economic and sometimes military means to promote the emergence of a multi-polar world. They offer Washington’s enemies some kind of shield with which to resist the scandalous attacks of the Trump administration. Beijing and Moscow project their resistance with a view to their long-term goals, given that in the short term they face the implacable hostility of Washington and its lackeys.
The fate of the new multipolar world order depends on how effectively China and Russia can weather the storm that Washington unleashes.
Washington’s European allies are punished for importing Iranian oil, cannot participate in Syria’s reconstruction, are induced to abandon joint projects with Russia (Nord Stream II); are asked to reduce China’s technological imports, and not to get involved in the world’s largest project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
All these demands come at a time when Donald Trump continues to undermine the current globalist world order that his allies had come to rely on to maintain the status quo. U.S. allies are obligated to comply with Washington’s requests, even if it damages their commercial interests and, in the medium and long term, has serious consequences.
This is the main reason the European countries want to diversify their trade and de-dollarize their economies.
With a US administration fragmented into several factions, constant changes in strategy and approach that end up weakening Washington’s international stature, the Pentagon’s military planners fear an open conflict with Iran or Venezuela, more than anything else, for purely propagandistic reasons.
Washington’s formidable firepower would probably be able to defeat any defense Tehran or Caracas could offer, but at what price? The myth of the invincibility of U.S. weapons is being challenged by Moscow’s defensive capabilities deployed in Syria and Venezuela. These same capabilities are readily available to Tehran should Washington decide to attack the Persian country.
But the likelihood of such a war is decreasing and Pentagon military planners fear a much worse scenario for the United States because Iran is three times bigger than Iraq and it would need about 1.2 million U.S. troops to occupy the country permanently.
Iran, moreover, is one of the world’s top 15 powers and Washington for the first time would face a high-capacity opponent, something that Americans have been trying to avoid for decades. They fear revealing the vulnerability of their weapons systems as a result of corruption and misguided strategic decisions. Pentagon planners have no intention of revealing their military vulnerabilities in a war with Iran.
The loss of U.S. military prestige would also demonstrate to countries that have hitherto been under Washington’s control that this dog barks rather than bites, making it even more difficult for the United States to intimidate countries with the threat of future military force.
What seems so difficult for Trump to understand is that his foreign policy is slowly eroding America’s superpower status. Since Trump is not really committed to any war, this will only lead to a humiliating setback.
A commitment to no more wars could be one of the last electoral promises to which Trump wants to remain true.
July 24, 2019.
This article can be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Bolton Controls Trump
John Bolton Controls the Government and Trump
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Donald Trump’s government has been, for U.S. foreign policy, something like an elephant in a china shop. It’s not only because he concentrated on achieving benefits and privileges for his nation to the detriment of the rest of the world, however. It’s also thanks to the economic and military power they have achieved on the basis of the unjust global economic relations imposed by the current capitalist system.
Jeff Bezos, is founder and executive director of the Amazon emporium. In 2015 Bezos was the fifth richest man in the world and in 2017 reached the top of Forbes magazine’s list of multimillionaires. On his blog, Bezos published information on the struggles and internal discussions within Trump’s team around the inexorable march of the US towards war against Iran and the danger of John Bolton in the swarm that has developed. From them, I extract much of this data.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned Iranian leaders that any attack by Tehran or its people that results in the death of one member of the U.S. military will be met with a military counterattack by Washington. Such a warning was made from Baghdad in May, when he was visiting Iraq. The issue could become critical very soon as in recent days there were rocket attacks in Iraq against targets in which there are American personnel.
Some of these attacks came from areas where there are still clandestine ISIS (Islamic State) groups with improvised and imprecise weapons that could accidentally kill a US soldier.
Concern about an escalation is particularly intense in the Pentagon, where the absence of a confirmed Secretary of Defense has fuelled concern that White House and State Department hawks may push the military beyond its specific mission of destroying remnants of the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria, which, in the current circumstances, increases the potential for conflict with Iran.
It has been reported on several occasions and by different means that Trump is somewhat isolated from anti-war views within his own regime. Government officials interviewed by the Washington Post said National Security Advisor John Bolton has dominated Iranian policy, maintaining strict control over the information that reaches the president and drastically reducing the meetings in which senior officials meet in the White House Situation Room to discuss policy.
The intensification of the “maximum pressure” campaign has triggered internal debates about how best to carry out the President’s orders. At the State Department, a discussion about how difficult it is to pressure Iran through sanctions ended with those with the harshest possible approach prevailing.
While State Department officials were cunningly trying to find the “weak spot” that would weaken Iran through sanctions, without putting so much pressure on Iran that it would withdraw from the nuclear deal. Others argued that Trump’s goal was to destroy the agreement at any price in order to pursue a more expansive policy that would paralyze Iran’s forces throughout the region.
However, Pentagon and State Department officials have complained of the difficulty of getting a presidential hearing for it under Bolton. As a result, arguments about policy do not reach the president.
Regional military commanders always ask for more troops and more ships, which increases the possibility of “accidents” and makes war more likely. John Bolton uses each and every small incident to send more troops!
Unlike his advisors, Trump always seems to minimize the importance of Iran’s actions. So the other scenario is to claim that Trump is a fool and the war hawks use him as a tool to implement their preferred policies.
Former high-ranking British espionage (MI6) official Alastair Crooke asserts that this second scenario is the real one. He says this is not because Trump consciously wants war, but because the hawks around him, particularly Bolton, corner him. Trump’s main mistake may be that he believes that Iran will ultimately seek an agreement.
Crooke argues that Bolton, and Netanyahu behind him, outperform U.S. intelligence on Iran. They transmit “intelligence” to the president and the media, just as Vice President Dick Cheney did in the run-up to the war against Iraq.
Bolton chairs strategic dialogue meetings with Israel (NSC) whose intention is to develop a joint action plan against Iran. This means that Israeli intelligence assessments are being sent directly to Bolton without going through US intelligence for assessment. In other words, Bolton holds the reins in his hands.
June 26, 2019.
This article can be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO
Trump Backs Full Spectrum Dominance
Trump Backs Full Spectrum Dominance
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The United States is formally committed to dominating the world by 2020. President Trump’s Space Directive-4, on the production of laser-armed combat aircraft as possible precursors to space weapons and the possibility of nuclear warheads being placed in orbit, moves the clock forward.
An interesting and credible paper by T.J. Coles in Counterpunch recently reported that in 1997, the re-established U.S. Space Command announced its commitment to full spectrum dominance by 2020, which means military control over land, sea, air and space to protect U.S. interests and investments.
Protecting means guaranteeing the operational freedom of U.S. investments, which in turn means “corporate profits.”
The journalistic work explains that, in the past, the Army was deployed based on the interests of settlers who stole land from Native Americans in the genocidal birth of the United States as a nation.
A National Defense University report recognizes that, by the 19th century, the Navy had evolved to protect the newly formulated “grand strategy” of the United States. In addition to the supposed protection of citizens and the constitution, the guiding principle was, and continues to be, “the protection of American territory … and our economic well-being.
According to the Air Force’s Strategic Study Guide, by the 20th century, the Air Force had been established, ensuring energy supply and freedom of action to protect vital interests, such as trade. In the 21st century, these pillars of power were reinforced by the Cyber Command and the future Space Force.
The use of the Army, Navy and Air Force – the three dimensions of power – means that the United States is already close to achieving “full spectrum dominance”. Brown University’s Cost of War project documents current U.S. military involvement in 80 countries, or 40 percent of the world’s nations.
This includes 65 so-called counterterrorism training operations and 40 military bases. According to this measure, “full spectrum dominance” is almost halfway there, although it leaves out U.S. and NATO bases, training programs and operations in Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Ukraine.
As the United States expands its space operations – the fourth dimension of the war – the race for “full spectrum dominance” accelerates. Space has long been militarized in the sense that the United States uses satellites to guide missiles and aircraft. But the new doctrine tries to turn space into a weapon, for example by blurring the boundaries between high-altitude military aircraft and space itself.
Today’s space energy will be harnessed by the United States to ensure mastery of the satellite infrastructure allowed by the modern world of the Internet, e-commerce, GPS, telecommunications, surveillance and the fight against war. Since the 1950s, the United Nations has introduced several treaties to prohibit militarization and the placement of weapons in space. The most famous of these is the Outer Space Treaty (1967). These treaties aim to preserve space as a common good for all humanity. The creation of the United States Space Force is a flagrant violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of these treaties.
In more recent decades, successive U.S. governments have unilaterally rejected treaties to strengthen and expand existing agreements for peace in Space. In 2002, the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), allowing it to expand its long-range missile systems. In 2008, China and Russia submitted to the United Nations Conference on Disarmament the proposed Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and the Threat or Use of Force against Outer Space Objects. “Full Spectrum Dominance” is not only a danger to the world, but also to American citizens, who would suffer the consequences if something goes wrong with the complicated space weapons of their leaders.
Coles concludes his work by pointing out that “the catastrophic scenarios that arise in relation to these and other areas of development present the possibility of other, no less calamitous impacts, including ultimately the end of the world, or at least of humanity. June 21, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by citing PORESTO newspaper as the source.
Yankee Bombings and Endless Wars
Yankee Worship of Bombings and Endless Wars
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, from Libya to Somalia in Africa, from Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, all forming a U.S. air curtain descending on a huge swath of the planet with the declared goal of fighting terrorism. Its main method is summed up in surveillance, bombardments and more constant bombardments. Its political benefit is to minimize the number of “United States boots on the ground” and, therefore, American casualties in the never-ending war on terrorism, as well as public protests over Washington’s many conflicts. It’s economic benefit: plenty of high-performance business for arms manufacturers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he wants and sell his warplanes and ammunition to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required). Its reality for several foreign peoples: a sustained diet of bombs and missiles “Made in the USA” that explode here, there and everywhere.
This is how William J. Astore, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel and now a history professor, interprets the cult of bombing on a global scale that he views in his country, as well as the fact that U.S. wars are being fought more and more from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them increasingly daunting, and finally asks: What is driving this process?
“For many of America’s decision-makers,” Astore says, “air power has clearly become a sort of abstraction. “After all, with the exception of the September 11 [2001] attacks by four hijacked commercial airliners, Americans have not been the target of such attacks since World War II. On the battlefields of Washington, the Greater Middle East and North Africa, air power is almost literally always a one-way street. There are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses. The skies are the exclusive property of the U.S. Air Force and its allies, so we are no longer talking about “war” in the normal sense. No wonder Washington’s politicians and military see it as our strength, our asymmetric advantage, our way of settling accounts with wrongdoers, real and imaginary.
It could be said that, in the 21st century, the count of bombs and missiles replaced the Vietnamese era body count as a metric of false progress. According to U.S. military data, Washington dropped no less than 26,172 bombs in seven countries in 2016, most of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, the “capital of terrorists,” the United States and its allies dropped more than 20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city literally to rubble. The Raqqqa bombing coupled with artillery fire killed more than 1,600 civilians, according to Amnesty International.
After Donald Trump took office as president, having promised to get the U.S. out of its endless wars, U.S. bombing has increased, not only against the Islamic state in Syria and Iraq, but also against Afghanistan. Civilian casualties increased even when “friendly” Afghan forces have been mistaken for “enemies” and also liquidated.
Somalia’s air strikes on Yemen have also been on the rise under Trump, while civilian casualties due to U.S. bombings continue to be underestimated by the U.S. media and minimized by the Trump administration.
This country’s propensity to believe that its ability to rain infernal fire from the sky provides it with a winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age. Whether in Korea in the early 1950s, in Vietnam in the 1960s, or more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the United States can control the air, but that dominance simply has not led to ultimate success. In the case of Afghanistan, weapons such as the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military arsenal) have been celebrated as game changers even when they changed nothing. (In fact, the Taliban only continue to strengthen, as does the branch of the Islamic state in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory nor to the closure of anything; only to even greater destruction.
“Such results are contrary to the logic of air power that I absorbed in my career in the U.S. Air Force, from which I retired in 2005,” says Professor William J. Astore.
June 19, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
The Bilderburg Meetings in Switzerland
The Bilderberg Meetings in Switzerland
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The 67th Meeting of the fearsome Bilderberg group was held from 30 May to 2 June 2019, with some 130 guests from all over the world. 23 countries that stayed in one of the most sumptuous places in Switzerland, the Montreux Palace Hotel.
The Bilderberg meetings began at the start of the Cold War as a discussion club of American and European leaders against communism or, more specifically, against the Soviet Union. The first event took place in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel (which remained as the name of the group), in the Dutch city of Oosterbeek. Since then its meetings have been in various places in the western world, most of them in North America.
Switzerland has been one of the Group’s preferred host countries after the United States. Switzerland had hosted it five times before this occasion (1960, 1970, 1981, 1995 and 2011).
Bilderbergers conferences are secret events, run by those who pull the strings behind world leaders – politicians, CEOs, big financiers and other business executives, artists and personalities from the Western world. They are almost always American and Euro-Western. This time there are a dozen from Turkey, Poland, Bulgaria and Estonia.
The most they get to the East is Turkey, perhaps in the hope of attracting it back to NATO as an alternative to its inclusion in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The SCO is not an Eastern version of the Bilderbergers but an open forum for economic development policies and defense strategies, without Western-style secrets or manipulations.
Bilderbergers’ associates overlap with those of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Trilateral Commission and the London-based Chatham House, which sets the rules for meetings, not to mention the World Economic Forum (WEF), held every January in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF represents a relatively transparent window to the world, although it also holds its meetings behind closed doors. The Bilderbergers are a completely secret organization, although it is said that their meetings are informal conversations that allow participants to freely use the information they receive, although they are not allowed to reveal the identity or affiliation of the speakers, nor of any participant in the particular talks.
Switzerland is one of the most secretive countries in the world, it is the world of banking, of big finance, it is the safe haven for international corporations that are privileged simply because they are domiciled in Switzerland. Not only do they pay lower taxes, but they also escape the ethical standards they would have to apply when doing business exploiting natural resources in developing countries.
As a nation, the Helvetic Confederation (Switzerland) is run by the US Federal Reserve (FED) debt-based monetary system, a scheme that has survived for the last hundred years, under the leadership of the Rothschild banking clan.
It is closely associated with and controls the Western banking system’s gold bunker, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, also called the “central bank of central banks”.
The BIS is intimately linked to Swiss finances, conveniently located near the German border, it served as an intermediary of the FED to finance Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union.
It is no coincidence that Switzerland was spared destruction in both world wars. It is the only Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country where laws are made directly by big finance and big corporations, i.e. where parliamentarians sit on the boards of directors of corporations and financial institutions, when they make laws for the people, a country where a white-collar interest group makes the laws that big capital requires.
One of the permanent agenda items propagated by the Bilderbergers is the reduction of the world’s population, so that the few at the top can live better and longer with the world’s rapidly diminishing resources.
Talking about the future of capitalism does not mean that we consider that to be the only possible system,” André Kudelski, organizer of the event, told the Swiss newspaper 24 Heures. And in that he is right, capitalism is not only not the only viable system. It is the only one that is proven not to be viable, because it has demonstrated its feasibility by spreading injustice, inequality, crime and misery all over the world.
John Bolton’s Dangerous Psychopathology
John Bolton’s Dangerous Psychopathology
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
John Bolton has been saying for years that he wants to overthrow the Iranian government, but this time he seems to have gone too far, writes Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News and former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and many other newspapers.
“I met John Bolton and interacted with him almost daily with my colleagues in the press corps at United Nations Headquarters in New York, when he was the United States ambassador there between August 2005 and December 2006. Most of his diplomatic colleagues, officials and journalists were surprised that Bolton was appointed as the representative of the United States for his long and public disdain for the UN.
In 1994 Bolton had said publicly that “the United Nations Secretariat in New York has 38 floors and if I lost ten floors, nothing would change.” Even more revealing was when in that same conference he confessed that “no matter what the UN decides, the United States will always do what it wants”.
For Bolton, these frank admissions classify as signs of force, should not be taken as reasons for alarm.
He is a man without a sense of humor and, at least at the UN, he always seemed to think that he was the most intelligent person in the room. In 2006, he gave a conference at the United States mission to correspondents at the UN, on nuclear enrichment. Its objective was to convince the audience that Iran was close to having an atomic bomb despite a 2007 National Intelligence Calculation of the United States that Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
But arrogance may have finally defeated Bolton. At the top of that agenda has maintained the stated goal for years: bomb and overthrow the Iranian government.
Bolton has a very high judgment on himself, rooted apparently in a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness. He always seems angry and one can never define if the reason for the dispute is personal or diplomatic. He personally takes on political or other differences with nations that disagree with the positions of the government of the country he represents. In this field, he links his sense of personal power with that of the United States as a nation.
It is more than any ideology. It is fanaticism. Bolton believes that the United States is exceptional, indispensable and superior to all other nations … and is not afraid to say it in public. He is not the typical government official who moves from passivity to aggression. It is aggressive always. He is always willing to make intimidation personal in the name of the country he represents.
It is, of course, a vociferous instigator of the US coup in Venezuela and was the one who organized the “Brooks Brothers mutiny” that interrupted the vote count in Florida in the disputed presidential election of 2000.
Practice the common tactic in the US ruling class to describe the disobedient leaders who are about to be overthrown: Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Hitler Putin. This derives from a false rebirth of the glory of the USA after World War II: painting the adventures abroad as moral crusades, and not as naked aggressions in search of gain and power.
Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. It is unique in the purity of this pathology.
He was chosen for the position by a president with very limited knowledge of international affairs – except in the case of real estate.
Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump withdrew the US from the six-nation agreement that caused Tehran to reduce its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for a relaxation of US and international sanctions. In response to increasingly stringent sanctions, Iran said on May 5 in Tehran that it would restart partial nuclear enrichment.
If this were a White House that worked properly, it would be the president who would order a military action, and not a national security adviser. “I do not think Trump is smart enough to realize what Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are doing to him. “They are manipulating him,” former US Senator Mike Gravel told RT this week.
The New York Times recently reported: “Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing a confident Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States in the process of war. before the president notices. “
The Imperial Triumvirate of War
The Imperial Triumvirate of War
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
In the midst of so many terrible things happening in the world, it’s easy to be depressed by the torrent of bad news generated by the Trump administration in foreign policy matters.
Resistance to the edicts of the U.S. Empire is growing daily. We see it in the reactions towards the trio of idiots who make up the Triumvirate of War: John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and John Pence.
Trump’s government has abandoned diplomacy to such an extent that only their crude and naked aggressions are evident. And it has gotten to the point that even the most accomplished diplomatic agents of Washington seem to have dispensed with subtleties as part of the tools of their profession.
Only the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, continues to speak in classical diplomatic language.
In his annual address to the diplomatic academy in Moscow, the Russian Foreign Minister hailed a new geopolitical era marked by multi-polarity. Lavrov explains that the emergence of new and rising centers of power to maintain stability in the world requires the search for a balance of interests and commitments.
He said that there has been a change in the center of global economic power from the West to the East and a markedly globalizing liberal order started losing its attraction and is no longer seen as a suitable model for all.
“Sadly, our western partners, led by The United States, do not want to agree on common approaches to resolve problems,” Lavrov said, accusing Washington and its allies of trying to “preserve their secular dominion of world affairs despite objective tendencies towards the formation of a poly-centric world order.”
He argued that these efforts were contrary to the fact that now, economically and financially, the United States can no longer solve the economy problems and other world affairs single-handedly.
“To fictitiously maintain its dominance and previous positions, Washington resorts to blackmail and economic coercion, making use of the media,” says Lavrov.
There is much to be drawn from this statement, which was published in Newsweek and many other media without much editorial comment.
Lavrov said he understands the conflict in its entirety and its depth in the psyche of US and European leadership, considering the feeling of ownership that does not abandon them.
This is what explains the intensification of aggression on the part of the Trump administration on the world stage.
Meanwhile, fear grows in the western halls of power.
Countries like Iran, Lebanon and Russia can do simple things like getting together to sign some kind of contract on oil exploration, or railroad financing, and the United States will freeze it out of the global financial system.
That is why the ultimate goal of this resistance is not a decisive and satisfying victory for all, but to survive long enough so that the opponent finally has no choice but that of stopping and going home.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo travels the world like a mobster. He lies about all matters and demands allegiance, but goes away empty-handed. Blackmail only works with the weakest and most isolated, like Ecuador, where what was at stake was “only” the life of Julian Assange. Ecuador is about to discover how expensive the generosity of the United States and the IMF are.
Such was the essence of Pompeo’s statement on the destabilization of Venezuela by China. It’s also why Maduro refused US and IMF aid, and why he had to pay for this with the destabilization of his country, through sanctions, threats and blackouts….
No wonder the ambassador of China in Chile exclaimed: “Mr. Pompeo has lost his mind.”
For Trump’s foreign policy team, the moment of truth is approaching. Will they start a war with Iran at the instigation of the newly re-elected Benjamin Netanyahu?
Empires don’t like to be disrespected; less still to be ignored. Therefore, there seems to be no possibility that Trump’s plan may work. The axis of resistance, despite all the small moves, is to win the war of attrition. The U.S. maximum pressure policy has a finite lifespan, because –like all things in economics– it has a temporary function.
And every small movement, every action big or small, whether in response to sanctions or behind-the-scenes pressure, changes the state of the conflict. And it is not in the nature of the people behind Trump’s policies to admit failure. They will continue to push until there’s a catastrophic outcome.
April 24, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
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