Chris Hedges: America is a de-facto one-party state whose business is war

By Dilip -

Wars can get started by Democrats, such as Harry S. Truman in Korea or John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, and perpetuated by Republicans. Or they can get started by Republicans, such as George W. Bush, and perpetuated by Democrats such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Bill Clinton, without declaring war, imposed sanctions on Iraq and authorized the Navy and the Air Force to carry out tens of thousands of sorties against the country, dropping thousands of bombs and launching hundreds of missiles. The war industry, with its $768 billion military budget, along with the expansion of Homeland Security, the FBI, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the National Security Agency, is a bipartisan project... political leaders such as Henry Wallace in 1948 and George McGovern in 1972 who dared challenge the war machine were ruthlessly hounded into oblivion by the leaders of both parties...

Democrats, the More Effective Evil

When all else fails, when you are clueless about how to halt a 7.5% inflation rate, when your Build Back Better bill is gutted, when you renege on your promise to raise the minimum wage or forgive student debt, when you can’t halt the Republican suppression of voting rights, when you have no idea how to handle the pandemic which has claimed 900,000 lives – 16% of the world’s total deaths although we are less than 5% of the world’s population – when the stock market fluctuates on wild rollercoaster rides of highs and lows, when what little help the government offered to the labor force - half of whom, 80 million, experienced a period of unemployment last year - sees the termination of the extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance, forbearance for student loans, emergency checks, the moratorium on evictions and expansion of the child tax credits, when you watch passively as the ecocide gathers momentum, then you must make the public afraid of enemies, foreign and domestic.

You must manufacture an existential threat. Terrorists at home. Russians and Chinese abroad. Expand state power in the name of national security. Beat the drums of war. War is the antidote to divert public attention from government corruption and incompetence....

https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/14/hedges-democrats-the-more-effective-evil/


America isn't breaking. It was already broken. By Andrew Gawthorpe // Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick


TOM ENGELHARDT: A World at the Edge


Alfred McCoy: The crumbling delusion of Washington's endless world dominion


In 1953, the Republican Party overthrew the Iranian Government; in 2021 it used the same techniques against the elected US President


Mauritius formally challenges Britain’s ownership of Chagos Islands


Robert Reich - Beware of this deadly mix: oligarchic economics and racist, nationalist populism


Mohammed Hanif: The rest of the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise


Donald Trump's gift to America: Realizing we've never been a liberal democracy. By PAUL ROSENBERG


The Break-Up of Britain / The US today resembles the Soviet Union just before it fell


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