Listen to a reading of this article:

Post-Iraq the US has zero moral authority. The narrative managers aim to suck you in to arguing about the minutiae of the inner workings of the latest target of the empire, when in fact a simple “Shut the fuck up, it’s none of your business” is all they deserve.

What the US and its proxies are doing with Yemen is universes more horrific and universes more urgent than what Russia is doing with Ukraine.

The Ukraine invasion that never arrives is showing us once again that when it comes to Russia you really can just completely ignore all the so-called “experts” in the mainstream media. Just dismiss 100 percent of everything they say. Any random schmuck’s best guess is better than theirs.

The US has spent years accusing Russia of inflaming far right extremism in America and that whole time they were fixing to ship weapons to Nazis in Ukraine.

Putin should run an aggressive propaganda campaign insisting the US is about to invade Mexico and threatening severe repercussions if it does, then when the invasion fails to materialize take credit for it and say it’s because of his bold actions against the Biden regime.

“Oh, right, it’s not like the US already has a history of annexing Mexican territory or anything, you despicable White House propagandist. And I guess you’ve never heard of a little thing called IRAQ??”

Saying we need to defend Ukrainian democracy is like saying we need to defend Iowa’s fjords.

To be a westerner is to be continuously inundated with made-up stories about evil tyrants who want to terrorize the world while living under a vast empire that is actually terrorizing the world.

Boy I feel sorry for all those ignorant assholes who don’t watch the news and have no idea that Putin is invading Ukraine and Trump was a Kremlin agent and Saddam had WMDs and capitalism is totally working and America is the greatest country on earth.

Looking to the mainstream media for truth is like looking to a prostitute for love. That’s not what they’re there for. That’s not their job.

The type of financial blockade they’re setting up in Canada today will with 100 percent certainty be used against other protest movements which pose a problem for the powerful tomorrow. Including the ones you support.

It’s not about Zero Hedge. It’s not about Russian propaganda. It’s not about Covid misinformation, election security, foreign trolls or QAnon. It’s about ruling power structures needing to normalize and expand the regulation of online speech to protect consent for the status quo.

Few people understand just how important it is for the powerful to control the narrative about what’s going on in the world. It’s the primary thing standing between the status quo and revolutionary change. They’d do anything, and I mean anything, to keep it.

When governments and their media mouthpieces keep offering diverse and unrelated reasons why online information needs to be more strictly controlled, it’s not hard to see that the strict control of information is itself their real objective. Today they’re back to focusing on “Russian propaganda”. Tomorrow it will be back to “Covid misinformation” or “domestic extremism” or some other justification. But that’s all they are: justifications. For something they already intend to do and have been working toward for a long time.

It’s like if some stranger kept following you around telling you all different reasons why it’s very important that you hand him your wallet. At a certain point it must occur to you that it’s not really about those reasons he’s giving you, it’s just him trying to get your wallet.

The US empire does not promote democracy, it violently opposes it and subverts it at every opportunity. Opposing the planetary domination of the US empire is what promotes democracy.

Westerners are so propagandized that the ones I encounter find it easier to believe I just so happen to support every evil regime in the world, whether capitalist or communist, than to consider the possibility that the US regime is the real evil and I simply oppose that evil. They actually imagine I’m looking at each of the governments being targeted by the US empire, thinking “Hmm, this Kim Jong Un has some good ideas. Oh look, I also agree with Vladimir Putin! And the Iranian government as well! All their positions sound good to me.”

I mean, how brainwashed do you have to be to think that? It can’t possibly be because the US and its allies are quantifiably the most destructive and murderous power structure in today’s world, and opposing such a beast is a completely normal thing that literally everyone should be doing.

Person criticizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth = RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA!

Entire western political/media class pumping out uniform plot hole-riddled narratives about governments who disobey Washington = just the normal news teaching you what’s true.

Hollywood movies allow us to fantasize about beating up murderous villains, stopping terrorists and defeating evil empires without having to actually stand up to them in real life, which we don’t want to do, because we’re afraid of them, because they’re our own government.

Internet communists like to talk tough about supporting violent revolution but we all know we’re so far from any kind of real revolution at this point in the game that it’s about as brave as saying you’re willing to fight Skeletor.

Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the mainstream news media are just as integral a part of the empire as its military.

Don’t worry if people call you a “contrarian”. Frequently disagreeing with mainstream consensus is probably a sane and healthy thing to do in a profoundly sick society.

________________________

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35 responses to “The US Has Zero Moral Authority: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”

  1. In truth, the zio-amerik hegemon had little, if any moral authority PRE-Iraq to squander either.

  2. “looking to a prostitute for love.”
    My guess is that the problem with Americans besides that their parents turned them into psychopaths is that they don’t turn to prostitutes for love or become prostitutes themselves. Killing is much more respectable? In case nobody ever noticed, prostitutes are people too, and are very capable of love, of both giving love and receiving love
    So, people want to talk about narrative? What about the hate narrative concerning prostitutes in this country? Or in any other country where the predominant language is English? The English Empire? Never heard of it? City of London? Controls the US military and most world markets, never heard of it? Hatred of prostitutes? Most of those prostitutes started their careers as prostitutes as children; and the English hate them? They hate themselves. That’s why Americans are shit people, because they turned children looking for love into starving prostitutes that they can then hate, because children grow up and become adults, except that, that never really happens in America, Americans just basically turn into hate.

  3. Here in The States, we’ve some senile old criminal squealing intentionally blatant lies on all TV, radio, blogs and we’re being told by the insane kleptocrats we let KILL our kids & re-re-reinfected COVID victims we MUST believe or Tinkerbell will DIE! We do this because we’re too cowardly, stupid, insipid and servile and pretend life is like puerile TV shows, written by the very most brainwashed suck-ups’ kids, & this is the full extent of our delusional lives.

    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/new-data-omicron-ba-2-more-contagious-and-severe-than-ba-1-yet-officials-committed-to-relaxing-protections.html

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-nothing-normal-about-one-million-people-dead-from-covid1/

    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/02/the-frozen-ground-theory-and-other-ukraine-war-nonsense.html#more

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/02/17/with-its-doomsday-clock-at-100-seconds-to-midnight-the-bulletin-of-the-atomic-scientists-calls-for-escalating-us-aggression-against-russia/

  4. Let me think… the US used two nuclear weapons on defenseless civilians in 1945 and justifying that horror by saying that those people were “Japs”. Since 1945 the US has been responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people around the planet. Shall we step into the time machine and go back to 1776 to really see that the US never had moral authority…ever.

    1. Don’t forget the atrocities of Dresden Germany, there wasn’t a military target remotely involved, the people just needed some democracy.

  5. Meanwhile in Ottawa,
    rifles have arrived,
    totalitarians are salivating.
    :
    https://twitter.com/Gray_Mackenzie/status/1494723391764508676

  6. Marie Antoinette thought she was safe. Sometimes people surprise you.

    1. Was she vaccinated?

      1. Like Putin? 🙂

  7. https://www.johndayblog.com/2022/02/stand-and-smile.html
    ​Watch this space!​ Any pipeline from the Pars gas fields (Iran/Qatar) to Europe will transit Syria. The Pars gas fields are the largest in the world.
    US & Russian Jets In Dangerous Intercept Incident Over Syria​
    ​Russia still acknowledges the airspace in question as officially belonging to Syrian sovereignty, though US troops on the ground currently control this northeast region while backing proxies in the Kurdish-led SDF.
    ​ ​CNN described the details further as involving “A Russian cargo aircraft, accompanied by two Tu-22 Backfire bombers flew across Iraq into the so-called Eastern Syria Security Area without giving sufficient advance notification to the US-run coalition that they were moving through the area.” Typically each side is warned in advanced of such flights via a military-to-military deconfliction line, which the US and Russia semi-regularly use to avoid inadvertent conflict over Syria, particularly in places like Idlib, where US special forces recently raided the hideout of the head of ISIS.
    ​ ​In Tuesday’s incident, the US F-16s were said to have briefly escorted the Russian jets away from the area. CNN noted further that “While the incident was not considered threatening, the Russians repeated the action about six hours later when another of their cargo aircraft and a Russian military jet few through the same area.”
    ​ ​From both Damascus and Moscow’s perspectives, Russia’s military has been formally invited by the Syrian government to operate there, but not the United States. On Wednesday, in a highly symbolic gesture and likely message aimed at Washington, President Bashar al-Assad and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu – who traveled to Syria to inspect Russian naval exercises – greeted and embraced each other…
    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-russian-jets-dangerous-intercept-incident-over-syria

  8. “The US” and “moral authority” are such an oxymoron that one can’t help but laugh when seeing them in the same phrase – unless of course one has hemorrhoids or a toothache with a 9.0 magnitude on the Richter scale. The USG is the surrealistic collage of sanctimonious fornicating priests over Jolly Roger waving pirates, the embodiment of the phrase “wolves in sheep’s clothing”. Molière’s Tartuffe falls considerably short there. They’re such blatant liars that you have to conclude they’re outright insane, like the guys in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” that Randle McMurphy takes on a cruise. “Professor This and Doctor That…” These loons, when introduced with a title, looked just like the title. So do the USG men. Not even speaking of the presidents! The entitlement of Brandon illegally pushing his dubious experimental drug on everybody out of sheer corruption leaves anyone with two connected brain cells speechless and OBD (Orange Man Bad) made anybody with a conscience gasp in horror when he said the Obama government should have withdrawn from Iraq to save money and “kept the oil”. WHAT? “Kept the oil”? In a foreign country? That it had attacked on fabricated intelligence? I mean… you’ve got to pinch yourself to make sure you’re awake! Millions of gallons of oil that they smuggled out of Isis territory in exchange for weapons and funds! And then they did the same in Syria and still do! It beggars belief that they consider having a right to the Syrian oil because they’ve unilaterally declared Assad a monster! Compared to whom? To their chainsaw massacring and Houthi genociding Saudi friend? If that’s not piracy covered up by double standard sanctimonious sermons, I wonder what is!
    It doesn’t even surprise anybody anymore… Libya had one of the largest amounts of gold reserves in the world. Where is it now? Nobody knows… Nobody cares… Definitely not in the Bank of Libya! And the assets the US “freezes” when they want someone out of the way (Mubarak, Ben Ali, Saddam, Khomeini and others), where do they go? To hunger relief?
    The bridge too far however, for US propaganda, was definitely 9/11. Before that, you could understandably not pay much attention but 3,000 dead in an attack in which it is physically impossible that the USG didn’t have a hand, how do you morally justify that? And the cover up? Because it’s one thing to accuse nineteen alcohol, cocaine and hooker addicted “Muslim fanatics” to have disabled the defenses of the most surveilled airspace in the world and turned three steel-framed concrete towers into thin dust at the behest of a guy on dialysis is a virtual cave in Afghanistan, it’s another one to tamper with evidence, railroad the investigation and demonize truth seekers.
    All this doesn’t even begin to qualify for any attempt to find morals in it. It would be a waste of time since you don’t need medical qualifications to diagnose psychopathy at the root of it. We’ve got machine guns in the hands of raving lunatics loose on the streets here…

  9. I was correct. Washington simply could not wait for the war that it wanted so desperately. Now it is upon us. Yesterday was, in fact, a pull on the trigger they had contrived.
    ~
    Not sure how much honest accurate reporting we will be allowed to see if Washington has any say in the matter. Very little I would assume. Saker didn’t think standard Russian web sites would be allowed to broadcast, so he’s proposed alternative outlets to go for information.
    ~
    So they used the old tried and true car bomb false flag and then, naturally, called it a Russian false flag. Stinks entirely of Britain’s favorite strategy during its war on the IRA.
    ~
    Interesting Russian countermove to evacuate the entire population of the Donbas before they focus on chewing up Washington’s Ukie dupes and their brand spanking new munitions once they excitedly charge into the killing fields. I’d pity Zelensky if he had a trace of humanity, but he will be responsible for all the deaths of his canon fodder, unless he wants to preemptively surrender, which would be the wise thing. He’s and his predecessor have been effing with the bear for the last eight solid years and will reap what they’ve sown. Just a shame about all the innocents that will have to die because of another American power move.

  10. Greg Palast has a different take on this Russ-Uk – the best IMO- It could be to raise the price of OIL! Puts money into the coffers!

    Caitlin says “When in doubt, follow the money!” Right on!

    https://www.gregpalast.com/7-facts-about-ukraine/

  11. Republicofscotland Avatar
    Republicofscotland

    OSCE personnel have been sent into monitor what happens in the peoples republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, lets not forget that Poland now has the chair of the OSCE and has held it since Jan 1st. So Russia and the two peoples republics will not get a fair shake as they say, I expect the commencing of hostilities to be blamed on the two republics by the OSCE.

    1. Agreed. It is a **given** that the OSCE response will be a sham.
      :
      We can expect Congress to rubber stamp and accentuate whatever the OSCE monitors say.
      :
      The cast of characters in Congress will use their own membership in the OSCE PA to lend credibility to their words.
      :
      There is a parliamentary (PA) wing to the OSCE. Delegates from Congress are members of the OSCE PA. The first two ranking members of the PA delegation listed are clearly dual loyalists. Have not researched the full list.
      :
      https://www.oscepa.org/en/members/member-countries/united-states-of-america
      :
      It has already been written what their “response” will be.

    2. Congress has a commission, the Helsinki Commission, aka “Commission on security and cooperation in Europe”. The two ranking members of the OSCE PA are the Chairman and Co-chairman of the Helsinki Commission. On Feb 2, 2022 they held a hearing and a transcript can be found here:
      https://www.csce.gov/sites/helsinkicommission.house.gov/files/unofficial-transcript/0202%20TRANSCRIPT%20Russia%27s%20Assault%20on%20Ukraine%20Unofficial%20Final.pdf
      :
      Introduction to the hearing by Chairman Cardin:
      “So today we gather as Europe stands on the precipice of war. The Kremlin has amassed
      an enormous array of troops and heavy weaponry at Ukraine’s doorstep, demanding its
      submission to restore the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. The Kremlin’s threat menaces not only Ukraine, our partners in Georgia and the wider region, but also the long-cherished dream and longstanding bipartisan U.S. policy to work towards a Europe whole and free.”
      :
      “to restore the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe”
      :
      How free and unbiased do you expect the OSCE monitors to be?

    3. … Helsinki Commission continued…
      :
      After Congressman Cardin and member of the OSCE PA let us know how rabid he is it was Co-Chairman Steve Cohen’s turn to speak:
      :
      “The very fact that we’re holding this critically important hearing is the unbelievable fact
      that we are at the stage of some type of a major possible war in Europe, something that should be left in the Dark Ages and not part of the future of mankind dealing with each other. We areconfronted with the possibility of the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II, President Putin amassing over a hundred thousand troops – I guess 170,000, they’re estimatingnow – and military equipment on the border of Ukraine, a country that’s trying to escape the legacy of Kremlin colonialism.
      :
      Putin is threatening the neighboring Ukrainians simply because they dare to pursue a pathof democracy, accountable governance, and transatlantic integration. It’s a developing democracy. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s a developing democracy and can only become a better democracy if allowed to breathe and live and be free. The Kremlin wants to deny that sovereign nation that ability to exercise the will of its people and wants to stop it before it becomes more experienced with democracy and entrenched.
      :
      Let me be very clear: The Kremlin’s rhetoric about Ukraine presenting a security threat
      to Russia is nothing more than a lie being used to force its own will on an independent European state. It’s almost comical to think that when you bring 170,000 troops and all of the type of military equipment to the borders of a country that you’re saying that that country is a security threat to Russia. It’s absurd.
      :
      Moscow fears Ukraine’s success as a budding democracy with its open market of ideas,
      vibrant media, and a strong civil society – all things which Russia lacks and that they fear will threaten their own system where they don’t have an open society and where people like Mr. Navalny end up in prison. They don’t have elections; they have prisons. Putin fears a successful Ukrainian experiment will lead the people of Russia to demand that autocrats like Putin leave office, they want transparency, and they want accountability. That’s the only danger Ukraine presents to the corrupt clique of kleptocrats and oligarchs in the Kremlin. They certainly don’t pose a military threat.”

    4. As a kicker, the Commission called as a witness Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institute.
      You may recall she was a central witness during the Ukrainegate hearings trying to coup President Trump with impeachment.

      1. Republicofscotland Avatar
        Republicofscotland

        The OSCE stayed silent on the Kazakhstan event, and Russia criticised them for it, as you say they simply cannot be trusted to be impartial when it comes to Russia.

        https://eng.belta.by/politics/view/osces-reaction-to-events-in-kazakhstan-slammed-as-shameful-146951-2022/

  12. The US “justice” system relies on threats and intimidation to get guilty pleas and can do so without evidence because the deck is always stacked in its favor and with virtually unlimited resources, it can impose virtually unlimited pain upon its victims whether they’re guilty or not.
    The US State Department lives by the same philosophy.

  13. Republicofscotland Avatar
    Republicofscotland

    Donetsk, evacuating civilians into Russia, as aggression from Ukrainian forces looks likely. Lugansk could be in the crosshairs as well.

    https://www.rt.com/russia/549874-breakaway-ukrainian-region-evacuation/

  14. Wise-ass Americans will have a ready response to your contention that their government has no moral authority on [name the issue].

    I know this one because I’ve lived among the species for 75 years. Goes like this…

    “I got your moral authority right here! And we will enforce it wherever you live, even in your Russkie shithole, Adolf!” As the self-satisfied wise-acre cradles his imaginary balls with his cupped hand and feigns imaginary pelvic thrusts.

    The lower classes may be a bit less refined in their delivery.

  15. Hey, isn’t interesting that Zelensky seems to gotten himself banned from western media. Recently he has been toning down the threat, telling the media to cool it with baseless asserterions of an immiment invasion and even making a (widely misunderstood) joke about it. Since then he’s virtually never qouted and the media doesn’t even mention him. It’s all biden and various EU and Nato leaders.

    1. Sounds about right. I read the correction that he was joking about Russian attack on 16th in Jerusalem Press, but it was not seen in the US press.

  16. moral authority does not extend past our own person and is dependent on having a functional brain – a very rare commodity in our polluted world. it may be extinguished within the next generation.

  17. I had a wild thought … maybe the Russians have found a CIA hack and are trolling them with misinformation. Invadion on Friday. No invasion. Postponed ’til Monday. No Invasion. Next weekend. No invasion. Eventually the public realises that the “government sources” are fools. Hilarious.

    1. That could well be one reason. Just another simple way to make the Americans look like fools and over-eager war mongers.
      ~
      Or, they may be keeping their troops on standby just in case the Ukies are suicidal and come down on the Donbas like a ton of bricks under Uncle Sam’s incessant goading.
      ~
      Personally, I would make that crystal clear because the US corporate media shills sure will not. Putin might also add that there must be a contingency plan for when the US reliably breaks its word again.
      ~
      As you can see, I am clearly saying that the US has left absolutely no reason for trust. At this point, Putin is not addressing the US government. They don’t give a damn what he has to say. Right now his only remaining possible audience is the American people. Some may remain objective and receptive to what he has to say. Hopefully, they will know who to blame when the radioactive dust settles.
      ~
      What must it be like in the Biden administration to know that practically everything you state for the record before the cameras is an unmitigated lie that will likely lead to massive death, destruction, and even conceivably the end of civilisation? Seeing Blinken speak at the UN is like a rerun of the totally contrived theatrical performance put on by Collin Powell 19 years ago. Washington never learns the moral lesson that it should. It only knows how to reflexively double down on the bad bets that it repeatedly makes.

  18. The US government sees the American People
    the same way it sees the Truth –
    enemy.
    :
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/no-valid-reason-to-withhold-more-than-14000-hours-of-jan-6-video-defense-attorney_4279113.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge
    :
    ‘No Valid Reason’ to Withhold More Than 14,000 Hours of Jan. 6 Video: Defense Attorney
    “Government doesn’t want the public ‘to see that the vast majority of what went on was very peaceful,’ Jonathon Moseley wrote”

  19. Here is the link to an article on ZH today.
    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stockman-were-not-useful-idiots

    This was quoted by a study.

    “Between 1947 and 1989, the United States tried to change other nations’ governments 72 times; That’s a remarkable number. It includes 66 covert operations and six overt ones.

    Most covert efforts to replace another country’s government failed.

    During the Cold War, for instance, 26 of the United States’ covert operations successfully brought a U.S.-backed government to power; the remaining 40 failed.

    I found 16 cases in which Washington sought to influence foreign elections by covertly funding, advising and spreading propaganda for its preferred candidates, often doing so beyond a single election cycle. Of these, the U.S.-backed parties won their elections 75 percent of the time.

    My research found that after a nation’s government was toppled, it was less democratic and more likely to suffer civil war, domestic instability and mass killing. At the very least, citizens lost faith in their governments.”

    1. Stockman has written several well-researched and highly articulate pieces on the crisis in Ukraine ever since the peace there was torched by Barack Obama in 2014. It’s quite unexpected but well appreciated that three of the most outspoken critics of this madness that the US pursues against Russia have been high level officials in the Reagan administration. US Ambassador to the USSR, Jack Matlock, and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, have been other rare birds who have accepted the onus of bucking the bipartisan Neo-con War Party. Like the rare Democrat who would do the same, Stephan F. Cohen, all are quite old now and Cohen recently died. Not much stands between them and the coming the deluge.

  20. Liked your essay. Not this essay, but many others on the internet, just like MSM, are all about falsehoods, but whatever they talk about, they all avoid talking about the real issue, and that is that there are many cannibals that live quietly among us.

  21. When Blinken goes before the UN to prevent a war in Ukraine, it is a tragicomedy. He has a full warmongering authority, to be exact. But no moral authority can be traced in his career description by Wikipedia.
    Together with now Sec. of Defense Austin (used to be called Dept. of War), they (with other warmongers) had a couple of firms for new weapons development by teaming up with the Silicon Valley.

    From Wikipedia:
    WestExec Advisors
    In 2017, Blinken co-founded WestExec Advisors, a political strategy advising firm, with Michèle Flournoy, Sergio Aguirre, and Nitin Chadda.[48][49] WestExec’s clients have included Google’s Jigsaw, Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward, surveillance drone manufacturer Shield AI, which signed a $7.2 million contract with the Air Force,[50] and “Fortune 100 types”.[51] According to Foreign Policy, the firm’s clientele includes “the defense industry, private equity firms, and hedge funds”.[52] Blinken received almost $1.2 million in compensation from WestExec.[53]

    In an interview with The Intercept, Flournoy described WestExec’s role as facilitating relationships between Silicon Valley firms and the Department of Defense and law enforcement;[54] Flournoy and others compared WestExec to Kissinger Associates.[54][55]

    Pine Island Capital Partners
    Blinken, as well as other Biden transition team members Michele Flournoy, former Pentagon advisor, and Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense, are partners of private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners,[56][57] a strategic partner of WestExec.[58] Pine Island’s chairman is John Thain, the final chairman of Merrill Lynch before its sale to Bank of America.[59] Blinken went on leave from Pine Island in August 2020 to join the Biden campaign as a senior foreign policy advisor.[57] He said he would divest himself of his equity stake in Pine Island if confirmed for a position in the Biden administration.[58]

    During the final stretch of Biden’s presidential campaign, Pine Island raised $218 million for a Special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), a public offering to invest in “defense, government service and aerospace industries” and COVID-19 relief, which the firm’s prospectus (initially filed with the U.S. SEC in September and finalized on November 13, 2020) predicted would be profitable as the government looked to private contractors to address the pandemic.[57] Thain said he chose the other partners because of their “access, network and expertise”.[50]

    In a December 2020 New York Times article raising questions about potential conflicts of interest between WestExec principals, Pine Island advisors, including Blinken, and service in the Biden administration, critics called for full disclosure of all WestExec/Pine Island financial relationships, divestiture of ownership stakes in companies bidding on government contracts or enjoying existing contracts, and assurances that Blinken and others recuse themselves from decisions that might advantage their previous clients.[50]

    Blinken is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[60] As of 2020, he was a global affairs analyst for CNN.[61][62]

  22. “Hollywood movies allow us to fantasize about beating up murderous villains, stopping terrorists and defeating evil empires without having to actually stand up to them in real life, which we don’t want to do, because we’re afraid of them, because they’re our own government.” No, they’re not OUR government. They’re the government of the plutocrats. Government is the ONLY power on earth POTENTIALLY powerful enough to end plutocracy…IF the people could gain control of it, which THEORETICALLY they can do in each election. Lose that lifeline of utopian thinking embedded in the yet-to-be-realized IDEALS of democracy, turn against the very IDEA of government because the bastards currently have control of it, and the game is over. THEY win. WE lose. Period.

  23. Not zero moral authority – negative. The USA passed the zero point on its way down years ago.

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