The U.S. Empire is BI-PARTISAN.

It’s easy to criticize the hawkish foreign policy that Trump and the Republicans are promoting.  Their gross cruelty causes some people to overlook the fact that Obama, Bill Clinton, and the Democrats have done similar things when they were in the White House and Congress.

A year ago Courage to Resist (www.couragetoresist.org) published in its May 2017 newsletter an article (“Empire War Status” written on April 6, 2017, by Bob Meola, a member of Courage to Resist.  The information below includes some of his ideas and some of my own.

He wrote:

“A lot of people miss Barack Obama because he smiled nicely while he dropped 26,000 bombs on seven nations last year.  he was much more pleasant than the guy currently occupying the White House.

“He was, seemingly, so nice that most Americans looked the other way while he prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other Presidents, combined, ever, ran seven wars, and deported more than two million people.

“He signed the 2012 NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] and left that tool of fascism to Trump.

“When neo-liberal Democrats are in power, liberals get comfortable with wars and feel no need to protest them.  Hillary Clinton, the candidate of the CIA, pushed Obama to take out Gaddafi, in Libya, against the advice o the Pentagon.  The U.S. armed ISIS in Syria to take out Assad.”

I agree with this author’s concern about the Democratic National Committee’s alarm about Russia as a way to distract people from the DNC’s own interference in the 2016 presidential primaries, “when it rigged them against Bernie Sanders and asked the media to ‘elevate’ Trump” because the DNC thought Trump was unelectable.  By thwarting the surging grassroots populism that would almost certainly have elected Sanders to be President, and by cramming Hillary Clinton (one of the nation’s most UNpopular politicians — a tool of Wall Street and the Military-Industrial Complex) down our throats, the Democratic National Committee rebuffed the Democratic Party’s natural base and allowed Trump to position himself to Hillary’s LEFT (against NAFTA and the TPP, against NATO and endless wars) and get elected.

The Democratic National Committee’s anti-Russia propaganda totally ignores the fact that the U.S. “has interfered with 81 foreign elections and overthrown approximately five dozen governments since World War II,” according to Bob Meola in his article.  (emphasis added)

“NATO is a force for western aggression.  After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no reason for NATO to exist.  Russia was promised that NATO would not advance toward Russia in Eastern Europe.  Yet NATO slaughtered people, committed ethnic cleansing, used cluster bombs, depleted uranium, and chemical weapons and one third of its bombing victims were children in Kosovo, and in Bosnia and U.S. mercenaries committed war crimes and backed Neo-Nazis in Croatia when Yugoslavia was destroyed.

“NATO was used to support illegal aggression in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.  General Wesley Clark told us that the Pentagon had a plan to take out seven countries in five years.  The plan included Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.”

Regardless of who is President, and regardless of which party runs Congress, the bi-partisan U.S. Empire — fueled by the Military-Industrial Complex and its lavish campaign contributions to members of both political parties — relentlessly and violently promotes U.S. Empire.

Meanwhile, Presidents and Congress keep saying we cannot afford to protect Americans from poverty, hunger, homelessness, and illness.  Nor (they keep telling us) can we afford to protect the environment and climate.

Mainstream news media almost never mention these chronic, systemic problems.

Mainstream news media almost never challenge U.S. Empire, or its assumptions or its abuses.

 

 

About GlenAnderson 1499 Articles
Since the late 1960s Glen Anderson has devoted his life to working as a volunteer for peace, nonviolence, social justice, and progressive political issues. He has worked through many existing organizations and started several. Over the years he has worked especially for such wide-ranging goals as making peace with Vietnam, eliminating nuclear weapons, converting from a military economy to a peacetime economy, abolishing the death penalty, promoting nonviolence at all levels throughout society, and helping people organize and strategize for grassroots movements to solve many kinds of problems. He writes, speaks, and conducts training workshops on a wide variety of topics. Since 1987 he has produced and hosted a one-hour cable TV interview program on many kinds of issues. Since 2017 he has blogged at https://parallaxperspectives.org He lives in Lacey near Olympia WA. You can reach him at (360) 491-9093 glen@parallaxperspectives.org