Only once in modern times has an American election drawn fewer than half of eligible voters to the polls: Bill Clinton verses Robert Dole in 1996. Turnout was 49%.
Way back in the olden days it happened twice.
In 1920 Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox with 49.2% participating.
In 1924 Calvin Coolidge defeated John W. Davis and Robert M. La Follette in a three-way race with a 48.9% turnout.
The largest voter turnout occurred during the Rutherford B. Hayes verses Samuel J. Tilden contest in 1876. It was America’s 100th birthday year. Hayes won the election in the electoral college by one vote. He lost the popular count by a quarter-million.
81.8% of qualified men turned out to vote — women wouldn’t be permitted to vote for another 45 years. Most historians say the presidential election of 1876 was the biggest vote-mess in US history.
From Wikipedia: On November 11, three days after election day … results … were rendered uncertain because of fraud by both parties.
To make a long story short, Southern Democrats agreed to award all disputed electoral votes to Republican Hayes if he promised to put an end to Reconstruction.
The verbal (non-written) Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction in the South. Freed slaves were left at the mercy of whites who did not intend to preserve their rights.
Whites forced the overwhelming majority of blacks (who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line) to wait until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before permitting them to grasp the gold ring of enfranchisement.
The election of 1876 became an inflection point in the history of the United States. Termination of Reconstruction enabled the now united country to inject its military might into the Indian Wars. There was a genocide to wage; besides, a decade or more of help from the Ku Klux Klan had neatly terrorized the genie of racial equality back into its bottle.
The military was no longer needed to defend desperate Negroes. The Klan was more than eager to take over the job. As this essay is written, many historians continue to argue that segregation and inequality remain endemic in vast swaths of America.
From 1877 onward, KKK castrations and hangings convinced most Negroes that pursuing voting rights wasn’t worth the price: it would be 90 years before whites let blacks get anything close to an even break in the contest for survival in capitalist, racist America.
Whites once suppressed the black vote by killing black voters. Later, they charged blacks with felonies and convicted them before all-white juries. Felons lost their right to vote for life. Today, 26% of the black population in Kentucky are felons who can’t vote. In Florida, nearly two million black citizens are felons.
After 1877, whites decided to move past their ugly divide over slavery to neutralize instead the native Americans whose lands the Europeans had seized. If whites felt compelled to kill hundreds-of-thousands of “redskins” (and break dozens of treaties) to make the wilderness safe for whites, so what? Universal suffrage could wait, right? Voting hardly seemed relevant when so much killing needed done.
Decades of injustice and indifference marched forward into the 21st century before at long last the election of Barack Obama garnered anything close to a large majority turnout. 66.2% showed-up in 2008 to flip history on its head, according to the Washington Post.
The first black president — a valid Hawaiian birth-certificate enabled him to run — gathered the largest popular vote ever – 69.5 million. It’s a record not likely to be broken anytime soon. Donald Trump, eight years later in a country more densely populated, acquired a paltry 63 million.
Obama served two terms for eight years despite strong and persistent protestations by Donald Trump and his lily-white supporters that Barry was a Kenyan Muslim — a hater of all things American — a wannabe wrecker of white privilege.
The attacks have never really ended. Donald is threatening to charge Obama with treason for ordering spooks to “spy” on his campaign; for orchestrating an attempted “coup”. Perhaps a death sentence by hanging is the appropriate punishment.
In 2016 Trump with help from Russian, Israeli, and evangelical elites seized control of the United States despite one of the most lopsided popular defeats of any candidate in the history of USA elections. DT lost the popular vote by 8%, which in that low-turnout environment amounted to almost eleven-million votes. Hillary beat the Donald by nearly three-million. Third-party candidates took close to eight-million more.
Think about it.
Trump is president? Does anyone believe an injustice was done that ought to be set right?
Well, I do, for one.
According to some folks who once counted themselves among his closest friends (Michael Cohen and Tony Schwarz), Donald Trump will never relinquish power.
Are we going to believe them?
What if they’re right?
The slow-train-coming election of 2020 is an excuse that both Democrats and Republicans are using for inaction and delay. Isn’t it obvious?
No one wants to take on the bosses. Oligarchs can get to anyone; they can get to families. It’s amazing what doors can close on people who choose not to cooperate with those who have shown that they are capable of anything at all.
Legislators and judges, prosecutors and bureaucrats are dragging their feet refusing to make the decisions that will save the republic. They want to ride out the clock hoping that DT will die of old-age; by some miracle, citizens will be set free perhaps to — someday, somehow — stand-up for their wonderful country.
Pipe dream?
As this essay is written, the Trump family makes their plans to rule America into perpetuity. Jerry Falwell Junior of Liberty University floated the absurd idea on Twitter that Trump be given an extra two years to make up for time lost during the “Witch Hunt.”
The pictures that Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, seized from Falwell’s “pool-boy” had nothing whatever to do with Junior’s overly-supportive tweet anyhow. Everyone knows at least that part of the salacious story is true, right?
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
Seriously.
Jerry and Donald are soul-mates. Falwell admonishes his acolytes to conceal, carry, and train to kill Muslim attackers. What right-minded follower of Christ Jesus wouldn’t? Donald bears false witness by proving daily that slander, name-calling, and hitting back hardest is the way to win. With Jesus standing behind to egg them both, how can they not get their way in this world? On the way to the future they envision, they don’t lose.
The German Trump family intends to rule the world until the end of time, because the United States now stands at an historic threshold; it is perilously close to conquering the nearly 200 countries that make the community of nation-states. The Trumps intend to take advantage of an opportunity provided not even to Hitler; they will sit on a golden throne at the top of the world.
Who wants their kids admitted to a prestigious college?
Cooperate.
Who wants their kids to land big jobs?
Collaborate.
Who wants to live disease-free to the very end of a most pleasant retirement?
Capitulate.
These are the choices.
Is it possible to gain the whole world while keeping the nation’s soul safe and sound? Every Trump lunatic believes it is. Keep America First while undermining its constitution, its institutions, and its values; everything will fall into place like it should.
Folks who care about right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, fair-play and corruption must now make choices that will bring down a wall of concrete on themselves and the children they love.
The time is now.
The time is come.
It’s time for parents to eat their children.
It’s time to worship the Fuhrer.
Our ancestors fought a revolution so that their progeny wouldn’t be bullied — not by drug lords; nor by malignant kings who torture for kicks; nor by bubble-encapsulated queens who tell their starving subjects to eat cake whenever they are truly hungry; nor by heartless thugs who cage thousands of family-separated orphans to make the point that they won’t be disobeyed.
Our national heroes fought a revolution so that people might someday choose their leaders and through them their way of living. When the people finally got their chance, most stayed home. Those who chose — those who made an effort to choose — chose leaders who wanted only to rule in the cruelest ways imaginable.
Call people stupid while smiling down at them when they praise every crazy thing you do and say — it’s a living hell for the powerless; the irony is that the powerless come to love their supreme leader in time; abused people, like domesticated pets, learn to love and trust their masters, eventually.
The world is sliding into an abyss of unfairness and worse. It’s the way of history. Every generation of humans fails to make the world a place they would gladly take the chance to be born into a second time.
Only fools would choose to be born into a world of ten-billion suffering souls. What are the chances that anyone will be born into a happy place with safe food and water, loving friends, and fun things to do?
What are the chances?
A case can be made — I won’t make it — that the odds are near zero. I often wonder if it wouldn’t be a weird irony if the wealthy and the cruel were born again strictly by chance not into Hell but rather into a second life on Earth — the same Earth they built and looted in their first life.
The catch is that they will not be allowed to choose their parents or on which continent they will live. The selection of their circumstances will be made by chance alone. A lottery determines their start in life, their potential, their possibilities.
It seems fair, doesn’t it?
Reasonable demographic analyses show that the prospects for a happy second-life are weighted heavily against them. A second-life lottery will ruin most of those unfortunates who are forced by their success to play it.
The situation in America today is one where most people are in blind denial of the calamity that has befallen them. No one wants to believe that the president is a dictator who they are powerless to resist. He is enabled by terrible people — cowards, most of them — who enjoy hurting people. Many aren’t Americans.
Some deluded folks have embraced the president. They, like the Germans of the 1930s, are oblivious to his evil ways. Many believe they themselves are good — blessed by a higher power — but they lust after evil as if it were as harmless as a whore. They embrace and cling, pant and sweat to divert their minds from a raging venereal assault that will surely overwhelm them on the day they finally understand that they have lost everything.
To vote in 2020 for or against the monster who torments us is as futile as it is dangerous. With help from the bad people, Donald Trump is going to crush America out of existence.
Even if everyone stays home, Donald Trump will say that the largest turnout in history gave him the greatest electoral victory ever.
Should he lose, he will deny the result and claim the election was rigged. He will not step down until he dies, no matter how many “traitors” step forward to question his version of the facts.
Most folks know on some level that the president is a liar and a father of lies. Will people allow themselves to be fooled again?
Boycotting the 2020 election means that “we the people” are choosing not to validate the politicians who refused to secure our elections; who redistricted away our ability to fix roads and other infrastructure; who trampled health care, food quality, and earning potential.
Boycotting the 2020 election will show the oligarchs that we have given up on the idea that things can be set right. Some folks, yes, refuse to believe they are victims; that they are chattel who lost the freedom to change society when Trump seized power.
We have to embrace realism. Billionaires are not our friends. Oligarchs are the enemy. We can’t challenge them, but we can puncture their collective illusion that the rest of us enjoy playing gladiator games in their stadiums.
Some might wonder why anyone would advocate boycott when the election is one-and-a-half years away. Well, the election is what the talking heads on billionaire-media obsess over.
No one talks about impeachment (except that it’s a bad idea), because Israeli, Russian, and the evangelical mob-bosses want Trump. It seems like an unlikely menage de trois until folks understand that bullies have a common interest — to exercise a humiliating power over little people.
Guess what?
If you are reading this essay, the chances are good that you are one of the little ones. The bosses who laugh at your antics don’t care about you or me at all.
Yes, we should let them speak for themselves — who can stop them? They advertise their warped values on every channel, station, and website! — but trust me, everyday folks like you and me share a dilemma: we are adrift in rowboats on a big ocean where unruly warships stream.
The battleships are not going to rescue anyone in a rowboat no matter how desperate their cries for help.
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who once worked for the CIA, told anyone who would listen, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
Dissent. Resist. Boycott.
In the face of a smothering totalitarianism paid for by the monied and the powerful, we have no other choice. Cooperation, capitulation, and collaboration will bring ordinary folks nothing but loathing and loss of self-respect.
Until “outlaws” who have paid their debt to society are allowed to vote free and fair, no one votes. A forgotten prophet once said: we are all outlaws in the eyes of America.
The wealthy live behind gates for a reason.
I am asking Americans to work hard between now and Election 2020 to make voter turnout low.
Set a record.
35% or less might become, maybe, someday, a distress-beacon that the historians of democracies do not ignore.
Everyone stands for something. Why not stand for what’s right? Or take a knee. In the fresh, clean air of freedom, every powerless person can make that choice.
UPDATE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: On 26 March 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Nicolas Maduro on charges of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism, and the Department of State offered a $15 million reward for information that helps ”bring him to justice”.
It’s an album title – prophetic in its way — by Marvin Gaye, who was shot and killed by his own father on April Fools Day, 1984. Marvin would have celebrated his 45th birthday the next day, April 2.
Spring was on its way; no one saw winter coming.
It seemed at first that a fight between his parents went terribly wrong. Relatives tell different versions. In the end, it went down like this: Marvin’s father, a Pentecostal Minister and Healer, shot Marvin in his heart with a .38 caliber pistol Marvin gave him for Christmas.
Left behind were an adopted son, two bio-children, two brothers, two sisters, a half-brother, and his parents.
What’s Going On?
His father, it turned out, suffered from an undiagnosed brain tumor located on his pituitary gland. It made him violent; it drove him crazy. He felt scared. He feared his son. He shot the boy-man that he told everyone who would listen he truly loved.
What’s Going On?
Marvin Gaye propelled the Motown sound into the stratosphere of American popular music during the 1960s. Like most gifted black men in those years, he was a traumatized human being. He made the best of it.
Albums like What’s Going On and songs like Sexual Healing brought reassurance and comfort to millions of folks who suffered the emotional stress of living inside but apart in apartheid and militarized America.
In those days, like today, America itched for a fight. It found a good fight in Vietnam; it would soon find many others – all pointless and needlessly wasteful of both national treasure and human life. Like Marvin’s dad, America shot its sons in their hearts. America wasted a generation, which it forced to choose between fighting war and fighting against war.
Father, father We don’t need to escalate You see, war is not the answer For only love can conquer hate You know we’ve got to find a way To bring some lovin’ here today, oh oh oh Picket lines and picket signs Don’t punish me with brutality Talk to me, so you can see Oh, what’s going on…
A few souls managed to tightrope between the chasms of violence on both sides, but not many. Today, the United States is a couple of countries short of conquering the entire world.
Venezuela is one country among a dozen or so that sit at the top of a hit-list.
What will come next?
What’s Going On?
I’ve answered a lot of questions about Venezuela on Quora. I’ve never visited the country. I know almost nothing about it except what I’ve read in books and on Twitter by people who live there. Still, I have opinions. I’m not afraid to pontificate about the situation, because I’ve seen these coup-scenarios playout my entire life – seven decades and counting.
It’s like listening to a scratched record that constantly skips to play the same musical phrase; it’s like watching reruns of familiar shows like Leave it to Beaver and even the Twilight Zone. I can tell anyone how a show will end, because in their way all the old shows have the same predictable endings.
What’s happening in Venezuela and how it will end is both predictable and depressing. My standard of living and yours depend on what happens next. The security and safety of our Union depend on it.
The Russians and Cubans must lose. America must win.
Why?
We take the spoils, because if we miss our chance to seize the oil of Venezuela, over time the United States will slide into economic decline. Prosperity and the power of USA billionaires depend not only on free-trade and favorable trade agreements, but also on the resources they sequester; how much of the bounty of others they can steal.
It’s true.
What’s Going On?
TheBillyLeePontificator.comis now open for questions. What follows are answers. The most recent questions are first; the oldest are last.
1 – What’s happening in Venezuela right now?
Over the past several years the United States has been reestablishing its control over the countries of the western hemisphere, right? Dilma Rousseff of Brazil is a prominent example. Anyone who doesn’t know who she is — or her story — isn’t paying attention.
It won’t help to name others. People who know Ms. Rousseff need no explanation. For those who don’t, no explanation will suffice.
It’s easy for Americans to claim ignorance about what their country does to maintain its control over the resources and people of South and Central America. It’s not pretty. People are imprisoned and shot (murdered) to assert USA sovereignty.
Does anyone want to watch the processes by which the sausage they eat is manufactured? Of course not. No one wants to even think about it. The process is brutal and inhumane. It’s better not to know. All anyone really wants is for the sausage to taste good and not make them sick. No one prays for the safety of the pigs who give their lives so that people can enjoy their breakfasts.
It’s the same in Venezuela. The country has massive oil reserves. The leadership is allied with countries who exert their powers on the other side of the world. These countries are always making moves to gain a foothold on American turf. The result is turf wars, which is what Venezuela is.
The United States will kill and imprison as few Venezuelans as possible, hopefully, but it will prevail; it will secure Venezuela’s natural resources, including its oil, for the USA to use and buy from the billionaires who shape its vision.
2 – Considering that every superpower had its rise and fall, do you think that the US will ever drastically fall, and how far into the future do you think that will be?
Since World War II the USA has militarily attacked one-fourth of the world’s nation-states. Of the 195 countries in the world, the USA controls or “unduly influences” all but twenty-five, give or take — through treaties, alliances, trade agreements, and so on. The United Nations is located inside the United States for a reason.
The USA controls the entire western hemisphere and exercises its military dominance without much interference anytime it decides. The Pentagon is a big place. People underestimate its power, because the majority of its structure is not viewable — most of it is below-ground. The vast scale of US power is necessary to operate 800 military bases, which are located in every region of the world.
The financial system of the USA is a force-multiplier that enables the USA to quarantine with knee-bending sanctions both individuals and countries who oppose its goals. American financial leverage is legendary.
The United States is on a trajectory toward world domination that would make the Third Reich stand up and take notice. It is remarkable how US power has grown during my lifetime. The USA is always at war with somebody.
Except for the four years of the Carter administration, the killing and dying doesn’t stop. The numbers of murders has reached into the tens of millions since the end of the last world war.
I believe that the American empire will collapse when the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts. It might be 500 years from now or next Tuesday. There is no way to know for sure.
3 – Are the recurring power outages in Venezuela due to US interference in their country?
The United States could easily send in technical experts to stand up Venezuela’s power grid. It chooses not to. Not only that, it refuses to provide any kind of aid at all by refusing to work with the elected representatives of that oil-rich country.
Worse, the United States is plotting to isolate and embargo Venezuela. The US president wants their oil; USA oligarchs are at war with socialism; the State Department is at war with Russia who is providing aid to the beleaguered President Maduro.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the United States cares nothing for the ordinary people of Venezuela; it instead is destabilizing the country to secure its resources.
Securing resources in the western hemisphere is something the United States has done repeatedly since the end of World War II. Ask any bona-fide historian if I’m right. Its success is one reason why the United States has the highest standard of living of all other countries in its half of the world.
4 – Russia sends troops to Venezuela to give the United States a ”red line”. Should the United States be worried, and do you think this could start a war between the United States and Russia?
My answer is a guess based on no knowledge or evidence; here it is: the USA will not challenge Russia militarily as long as Trump is president. It’s not collusion; Mueller proved that our president is the most patriotic president that the USA has ever had (and will ever have since he is likely to be the last).
Every red-blooded gun-toting Christian in America knows that Russian oligarchs with the help of almighty God put Trump into power to kill us all for allowing gays to marry. It’s not hard to understand.
5 – What is Venezuela’s national anthem?
Glory to the Brave People
6 – Is it technically possible to sabotage a country’s electricity infrastructure using an electromagnetic attack, as Venezuelan president Maduro has claimed, as the cause of his country’s power failure?
Where were you during the Iraq War? Taking down Saddam Hussein’s electrical grid was a point of pride during that war. Our leaders bragged about it on the evening news.
USA’s ability to attack infra-structure is vastly improved today. Venezuela is the perfect place to conduct diabolical tests of new war-fighting techniques and coup protocols.
Why?
It’s the oil, stupid. (I’m using a popular expression for emphasis. It’s not meant to insult anyone’s point of view.)
Anyone who is knowledgeable about the post-world-war history of the western hemisphere knows that the USA has been or now is at war with every country. The United States runs things or makes those who oppose it miserable with sanctions, sabotage, and subversion.
It’s not something a reasonable person can argue against.
Said another way, only an ideologue or an apologist will deny the culpability of the USA for waging war against Venezuela. If the United States cared about Venezuela, it would help Maduro, not undercut him.
7 – Why do you think there is a nationwide power outage in Venezuela going on right now?
During the Iraq war, the USA took down Baghdad’s power grid. It’s something our country is good at. That this power outage occurred during destabilization efforts to install a new president doesn’t look good for the prime suspects.
8 – Where in the world is the next international war likely to break out?
First, it’s important for everyone to understand that major international conflicts are potential species-extinction events. Enough nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are available to enough countries to threaten the survival of humankind — should humankind fall into the abyss of a conflagration like it did during the two previous world wars.
It’s true that the last world war ended almost 75 years ago, but insufficient time has passed to be convincing that another world war won’t occur, perhaps sooner than anyone imagines.
One important reason why world-war has not occurred is because the United States has spent the post-world-war years consolidating its grip on empire. The USA knows the names, phone numbers, and addresses of every world leader and their relatives. It has cruise missiles and bunker-busters with each leader and family member’s name on at least one of them.
It’s personal. The number of individuals we don’t like and have removed from power is large and growing yearly. Maduro of Venezuela is the latest name on the USA Naughty List, but so, recently, was Dilma Rousseff of Brazil as well as countless others around the world — especially in the Middle East.
According to who counts, 195 countries exist in the world. The USA has conducted military operations against one-fourth of them since the end of World War II. Many conflicts are state secrets not shared with the public.
Expect major changes in Africa soon, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
To my way of reasoning, the best way to determine where the next lit-match will ignite is to look to past conflagrations. Countries with a history of warlike behavior are more likely than countries that lack such a history to start the next major international conflict.
What countries might these be? I’m not going to name them, because why make enemies unnecessarily who might have reformed their ways? But anyone with a knowledge of history and current events can create their own list. It’s not hard to do.
9 – How much worse can it look for Maduro? Denying hungry and sick Venezuelans from free food and medicine with guns. Isn’t Maduro’s time up?
Anyone with any sense knows that the USA engineered this debacle, because it is at war with socialism.
We invaded Cuba after they threw out the mafia, for crying out loud. We preferred organized crime to socialism.
10 – What should everyone know about the current political crisis in Venezuela?
Venezuela lives and dies on the price of oil. Low oil prices brought Venezuela to the brink of collapse in the late 1990s and made Hugo Chavez’s rise possible. Maduro, his successor, is falling on the sword of collapsing oil prices.
What confuses people is why.
Is the USA manipulating the oil markets to take down Maduro? The US has a consistent record of overthrow attempts against leftist governments. With a billionaire oligarch leading the USA, it seems possible.
Why doesn’t the United States help Maduro stabilize his country, which would be the humanitarian path? No one is sure. Common sense seems to suggest that our leaders are looking for a way to make a socialist system fail. Why else back a 35-year-old nobody to run the country? Wouldn’t aid to the elected government be an easier way to bring relief?
The Russians are involved, which further complicates. It’s possible that DT works for their side — so this coup that’s been in the making by our side during the past five years or so is sure to fail now that DT is aware and getting involved.
Time will tell.
It’s a sad state of affairs, what’s going on right now.
11 – Will a civil war happen in Venezuela?
The US has been at war with Venezuela for a long time now. Hundreds of America’s brightest have been working in their Pentagon offices for years to make sure socialism doesn’t succeed in South America.
Our wealthy oligarchs don’t want anyone to believe that a system might work where they aren’t allowed to steal as much as they possibly can and still call it “free enterprise.”
It simple, really. They are looking for allies inside Venezuela who are willing to blame Maduro for what America is doing to undercut them behind the scenes.
This crap started in Guatemala in 1954; it never ends.
12 – Why is Venezuela’s military backing Maduro recently? Is it worth it?
Maduro is the elected president of Venezuela in the same way that Trump is the elected president of the United States. Was the US election fair? Ask Reality Winner who is serving a five-year prison term incommunicado, because she disclosed NSA info on voting fraud. You will find that you can’t interview her.
Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA whistle-blower who exposed voter fraud and tampering in the 2016 presidential election. She is serving a five-year prison sentence — incommunicado as are other whistleblowers like Daniel Hale of the NSA and Teri J. Albury of the FBI.
So good luck figuring out what the truth is.
The billionaires who milk America don’t like socialism, because it is a system where people cooperate to create wealth, which they then share. Sharing wealth is anathema to oligarchs and mob bosses.
So, the USA is pulling out a well-worn playbook to guide itself through the process of replacing the experienced and elected leaders of Venezuela with a 35-year-old kid who knows just enough to do what he’s told. The USA promises to make him president. He promises to serve. It’s a kind of tit-for-tat.
To increase urgency and hysteria the USA manipulates currency and oil prices while it builds a right-wing cartel of nations to do its bidding. All the leaders will get rich under the plan. No one seriously gives a hoot about what happens to the poor.
The biggest danger is civil war, which happens to be exactly the same danger facing the United States. What goes around comes around.
The USA would be doing the world a big favor by helping Maduro get his country on its feet. Low oil prices have been catastrophic for Venezuela. Why don’t we help instead of using a bad situation as an opportunity to set up a bunch of oligarchs who will march to our drumbeat instead of their own?
Why is economic diversity such a bad thing? Ted Kennedy said in his last book that tycoons like his legendary dad were afraid that if socialism succeeds anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, it might become a prairie fire that takes down their edifice of privileges.
No tycoon wants a prairie fire. Every wealthy person believes they are self-made and entitled to all the advantages that their money can buy.
Ordinary people have about the same power to control the circumstances of their lives as farm animals.
It’s pathetic, really.
13 – With a regime change impending, within the next 30-50 years, will Venezuela consider socialistic influences for governmental structure again?
The pending regime change that is coming will take place in the United States. Americans are sick of boorish elites who — under a GOP led by pig Trump — won’t be electable in 2020.
One-party-rule by progressive democrats will bring relief to average people — something they haven’t experienced since the early 1970s. Many young people have no idea what it’s like to live in country that limits what the wealthy can steal and works overtime to bring equity to working people.
14 – Do you agree that reducing imports from Venezuela by the United States is an adequate short-term answer for helping that country and its citizens?
The best thing the USA can do to help Venezuela is to end sanctions, embargos, destabilization by our intelligence forces, and the policy of strategic strangulation, which is killing people — especially the weak.
The next best thing is to organize an international effort to airdrop food aid into the country. Flood the country with rice, powdered milk, clean water, potatoes, corn, etc. Inexpensive food is easy to collect and distribute and will help to strengthen the elderly, children, the pregnant, and the sick.
Flood the country with medical supplies and doctors to help the sick. Start talks with Maduro to offer him all the assistance he needs to get his country on its feet again.
15 – Is the newly accepted Venezuelan government by the United States backed by the majority of people in Venezuela? Or is it propaganda?
Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company, ships 500,000 barrels of heavy crude into Texas refineries every day. The crude is used to make diesel fuel for trucks. Without cheap diesel America’s goods and services get expensive real fast.
America’s oligarchs hate socialist countries. Most people can understand why. The foreign policy of the United States is to destabilize and overthrow all socialist countries whenever possible. Venezuela is an easy mark, because their leaders do not seem to be sophisticated.
Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor, John R. Bolton, are leading a coalition of nations to inflict strategic strangulation on the Maduro administration. The government cannot access its gold reserves (held in British banks) and is fighting to maintain control of Citgo, which adds 10 billion dollars to the nation’s coffers each year.
The USA plans to divert as many assets as it can to the puppet government it is setting up under the auspices of a 35-year-old kid who no one ever heard of before about three days ago.
The process of destabilization has been accelerated under Trump, and the USA is now making its move.
The USA is hoping for military defections combined with public demonstrations to force a sham election in the next 30 days to oust the socialist government in Venezuela and legitimize a new government, which they will control behind the scenes. They hope to assassinate Maduro if they get the opportunity. The Russians are sending in a large security detail to protect the lives of the current group of leaders and help them hold onto power.
The country of Venezuela is polarized much like the USA. The elites want the USA to intervene; the poor want Madura and socialism. All sides want the USA led embargo, destabilization protocols, and strategic strangulation to stop ASAP.
16 – Will the Venezuelan military switch sides if they see the US military lining up for an invasion? Don’t they care mostly about how much they are paid? What good is an ousted Maduro?
Overthrowing elected socialist governments is a specialty of US foreign policy. The USA is good at it, but it doesn’t always work.
Even an intense strategic strangulation of Cuba (and an invasion to boot) was unable to break down the Cuban revolution.
The USA killed two million Vietnamese but failed miserably to prevent the unification of North and South.
Early successful overthrows such as those in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) have convinced policy makers that the odds are in their favor when they decide to decimate a particular country. They have a better than even chance to prevail, so why not take it?
The problem is that everyone now knows — after 79 years of messing with governments — that the USA cares almost exclusively about itself and the protection of its tycoons. Democracy, equality, and basic fairness mean nothing to the United States in its conduct of foreign policy.
Many policy makers disagree with my point of view, but they are in the habit of giving in to self-deception to make it possible for them to live inside themselves.
17 – What is the likelihood that the US will at some time become entangled in a coup in South America?
The USA has a history of involvement in the politics of South and Central American countries. Coups are part of the history. Where have you been?
Seriously.
Destabilizing socialist countries in our hemisphere is an important component of the foreign policy of the United States. Everyone knows. It’s not a well-kept secret.
The USA keeps track of what’s going on through agricultural programs, aid, and assistance. When it desires change, the USA generally tries diplomacy first. If it doesn’t work, more violent methods have been used, including assassinations, disappearances, and coups.
Under certain circumstances, it can be illegal to talk about what exactly our intelligence services do to keep the Americas safe for exploitation by our companies. The most famous company that the USA went to war for was the United Fruit Company during the Eisenhower years. The president’s secretary held a lot of the company’s stock.
Some countries have raw materials that are considered strategic assets. The USA or its surrogates operate mines and other facilities to secure these assets and to keep other competitor countries from access. Right?
The instability in South and Central America that has arisen since President Obama stepped down is probably the result of activities encouraged by the newest president. He has lots of precedents to justify himself, correct?
18 – Are Russia and China’s recent provocative military maneuvers a prelude to war with the United States?
My belief — based on no evidence I can recite — is that our president is a pacifist. He enjoys pretend violence, like pro-wrestling, but is repulsed by real violence. He likes to threaten, yell, call people names, sue people in court, etc., but he is uninterested in physically hurting someone. For him fake violence is a kind of game. Often, he forgives and makes up later.
His mistresses have all said, as far as I know, that he treated them with kindness; something that many philanderers are not known to do.
When he bombed an airstrip to retaliate against a Syrian chemical attack, he set up the targeting so that no one on-site would get hurt. Yes, an attack on another target killed a hundred or so Russian soldiers, but it was an unintended screw-up he’d probably like to have back.
Our president likes to huff and puff and make deals; it’s a harmless game for him that has no meaning except for the fun he gets each day trying to outwit his opponents who he calls “rats” or “crooked” or “lyin” or whatever fits. Hillary Clinton, in real life, is one of his best friends, for crying out loud.
Trump is a liberal at heart, but he pretends to be a racist monster to hold onto his base, which is, let’s face facts, hold-overs from the Confederacy of the Old South. Southern racists are dangerous when angry; otherwise, they are the dumbest, easiest-to-manipulate voters in the country. They are like lemmings — if Trump says, “run off a cliff”, they’ll do it and praise Jesus for the opportunity.
Trump will not go to war against China or Russia as long as he can play monopoly with their oligarchs. He’ll bluster and threaten. He won’t pull any triggers.
One very interesting thing happened the day he became president. A prominent drug lord from Mexico was arrested and disappeared into the New York City penal system. Within a few days the man’s family was rounded up. They haven’t been heard from since.
So, the president has power. His problem is that a component of his power comes from sympathetic mob bosses, often with dual-citizenship — almost always from Russia and Israel. These “friends” aren’t shy about taking care of business, so the president won’t have to.
19 – The US could lose a future war against Russia or China, a new report to Congress has suggested. Do you agree?
The United States completed a two-trillion-dollar upgrade to our nuclear missile inventories during the Obama administration. The USA built a doomsday matrix.
I’ve heard rumors that a certain country has built a doomsday bomb capable of destroying Earth were it ever detonated. Folks should know that there is no upper limit to the destructive power of hydrogen bombs. Countries can build them as big as they want. They can blow up Earth itself.
The USA might not be able to win a hot war, but we won’t lose it to others, either. A war to the death against Russia or China is a war to the death of the planet. If recovery is possible, it will take thousands of years, but climate changes and the loss of resources will mean that Earth will never be what it once was; humans will never be what they once were.
War by major powers against each other (a world-war) is something that can never be allowed to happen again. The next world-war will kill billions of people and unleash a pandora’s box of suffering on the few unfortunates who survive. Rich and poor alike who live will be traumatized to the end of their natural lives.
Hot war is suicide. The leaders of every nation-state must give their last ounce of courage to preserve the one place in the universe where people have the hope to survive and thrive.
20 – Why is Russia’s military so powerful despite the fact that they spend less on defense than the USA?
1 – The Russians pay lower salaries and have fewer military bases. (The USA maintains 800 bases in 70 countries.)
2 – Russia is more than twice the size of the United States.
3 – Russia has the world’s largest reserves of oil.
4 – Russians are more literate in science and engineering than Americans.
5 – Russia has developed dangerous (to us) technological advantages in missile technology. They have air-to-surface missiles that are stealthy and reach velocities close to three miles per second. The USA has nothing in its arsenal that can track and shoot them down, which means that we risk losing our entire fleet of navy ships in a hot war.
6 – Russia has a fleet of drone subs deployed off our coasts.
7 – Russia does not seem to the have rampant corruption and cost overruns in its manufacturing sector that the United States is known for and which drive up the price of everything the Pentagon buys.
8 – Russians build their vehicles, artillery, and guns to perform in off-road bad weather conditions. They design their equipment to be simple, reliable, and easy to fix.
9 – The USA is paying unreliable private companies to administer a big part of its military space program. The temptations that lead to profiteering and unrealistic assessments of effectiveness might rot the foundations of military readiness. It is a risk the Russians don’t take.
Having said all this, the fact is that the militaries of both countries are nightmarishly lethal. The side that attacks first in the next war will accrue big initial advantages that could make a counter-punch ineffective. An immediate imbalance of power could easily become permanent and lead to catastrophe for the country that takes the first hit.
Technologies of modern warfare are making the world less safe for war-makers.
Hope is when the generals and civilian leaders don’t feel safe that they will avoid all-out war.
Terror-in-the-gut starts when military planners understand that the other side will strike first.
November 1, 2019:Since this essay was first published 17 months ago, things have changed. We have a new attorney general who believes his job is to protect the president.
Democrats control the House of Representatives. The new Speaker Nancy Pelosi is methodically unfolding what will soon become articles of impeachment.
Michael Cohen, the president’s fixer, is in prison. Felix Sater, Cohen’s childhood friend, has disappeared off media radar screens.
Despite the rapid rate of change, Billy Lee’s essay has never been more timely. America is in a race against the clock. Trump and his allies are unraveling America at a frenetic pace. The clock is ticking, and time is running out.
The Editorial Board
Our president seems to be working against our country, not for it.
He started a trade war. He’s bullying our trading partners.
He insults our allies. He breaks treaties. He threatens fire and fury, then coddles our enemies.
Get out of the stock market ASAP, I’m thinking. Trump is going to trash the country and mess up the world for freedom lovers. Not much time before all illusions shatter, it feels like.
Don’t do denial. Don’t go there. It will do no one any harm to protect cash and property from those billionaires who are going to steal it anyway from anyone stupid enough to give them a vehicle.
Trade warscan and do work for business owners but no one else. They wipe out the little people by driving up prices and reducing goods and services. Don’t be a little person Billy Lee; not this time.
Greed-hogs root-snouted America’s financial institutions in 2008 and took a big chunk of the 401K money intended for ordinary people’s retirement.
Does anyone remember when the GOP spent vast sums on wars and drugs to help their friends in weapons manufacturing and pharmaceuticals? The GOP added fuel to the fire by reducing revenues too — they created tax loopholes for the wealthy. When markets went south, they emptied the nation’s retirement piggy-banks (called 401Ks) to cover their losses.
They did!
They crashed the United States of America like a plane into a skyscraper. The USA was hours away from becoming a third-world country when Congress approved a rescue that involved a massive transfer of wealth from the middle-class to the wealthiest families in America. It was called the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
Who says it can’t happen again?
Interest rates are sure to rise; the GOP will empty social security and Medicare. They have no choice, because the USA won’t have the tax revenues to cover high rates on the national debt. The Republicans passed another tax cut for oligarchs a few months ago.
Surely, someone remembers.
It’s not about making America great again. It’s about making America break again.
Why? Because they can.
Billionaires don’t really care about us. They never will. Michael Jackson wrote a song about it. They killed him.
Americans have to push the GOP (who are the defenders of billionaires) out of government ASAP. Everything about the future depends on it.
Republicans are afraid of Russian oligarchs — the ultimate mob bosses. Russian oligarchs are the richest men on the planet. They are intelligence agents who carved up the Russian corpse after Reagan drove their empire into bankruptcy.
Republicans are paralyzed by the fear of foreign mob bosses with Boris Yeltzin accents. They seem incapable of doing the heroic things that need doing to defend and save our country.
It’s true.
GOP leaders are holding onto hope that they can get their families through this takeover; things will be set right someday, somehow, by somebody. They are dead wrong.
If not them, who? If not now, when?
Remember Germany and World War II? The silent ones ended up cooked, eventually — poisoned by gas and shot in trenches, their bodies burned in ovens to hide the evidence.
This is no time for cowards. The time has arrived when everyone must let go of fear and act like the heroes we must become to protect everything and everyone we care about.
If they take away our right to vote by subverting it, we will deal with it then.
For now, it seems like we are able to vote and have our votes counted, at least somewhat accurately. Yes, the last national election showed evidence of voter suppression — and tampering with vote counts around the edges in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
The GOP stopped all the investigations into irregularities and statistical anomalies. No one seemed to care much.
Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA hero who exposed widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election. She is being held without bail. NOTE by Editors: July 4, 2018 – Reality Winner has agreed to plead guilty. Her trial was scheduled for October, before the mid-term elections. She will accept a 5 year sentence plus 3 years strict probation. No electronic devices or communication with media is allowed. The NSA contractor revealed that certain voting-machine companies were compromised — raising the possibility that the 2016 outcome was rigged. Bad people who care nothing about democracy have silenced Reality Winner and driven her into anonymity.
Nevertheless, voting is what we have to do until we no longer can. It’s the only recourse. Everyone must pray for Reality Winner, the NSA heroine, who is rotting in jail with no prospect for bail, because she tried to alert Americans to the terrors that are coming with the sabotage of our elections and the loss of our freedoms.
If the day comes when America can’t save itself by voting, it will be impossible to avoid Civil War. The last war didn’t go well for anyone on either side. The difference this time is that foreign agents are crawling all over our institutions and media.
These agents don’t like us much. They want civil unrest. They want violence. Many play the role of patriots. They quote Bible passages — like Two Corinthians.
Don’t be fooled.
We have a lot to attend to, but the State Department and most other parts of government are being systematically dismantled. Here are three things among hundreds that must be looked after:
1 — China, Russia, and their allies are working furiously to overturn the global financial system. The plan is to leave the USA (and the EU and Israel) in the cold. It’s what bit-coin schemes, among other systems, are all about. Think about it. USA financial clout is scary. Certain state-actors want to make it impossible for the USA to extort their leaders financially through sanctions and trading bans.
2 — Japan is accumulating the world’s largest inventory of bomb-grade plutonium. It has the infra-structure to weaponize it. It has the modern missile systems to deliver it. Focusing on Korea’s nuclear weapons means next to nothing. Are Koreans buying fissile material from Japan? It takes ten pounds to make a bomb. Japan has forty-seven tons already and is adding eight tons per year. Does anyone know for sure what the hell is going on? Some samurai cult is making a killing.
3 — Russia has developed a new generation of high speed multiple-warhead missiles that no one can see or shoot down. They bragged about it on TV. What happens if we attack North Korea and Russia comes to their defense like they did the last time during the first Korean War? What if China joins in, like the last time? Read T. R. Fehrenbach’s book, This Kind of War. It could become a war where we get our pants handed to us — like last time.
The problems Russia presents go far beyond Korea; they extend to the Middle East certainly but also to the Americas where Russians have bases in Cuba and Venezuela. Our state and national elections are drowning in Russian interference according to every one of our intelligence agencies.
The media does not know how to protect our country. We cannot expect to look to the media, whether right or left, for guidance. The takedown is not going to be televised. Our military is led in many instances by good-ole-boys from the states of the Confederacy, like Louisiana and Mississippi. It’s not an ideal situation that is necessarily going to lead to unity.
Our leaders have proved to almost everyone but the hopelessly naive that they are haters. Many are white supremacists. The attorney general isn’t the only cabinet member with a reputation for racial bias. Many members of the current administration act like wolves in sheep’s clothing who hide their intentions between the covers of a Bible and the American flag.
Does it have to be this way?
Over the years, the USA has killed millions of Koreans, millions of Japanese, millions of Arabs, millions of south-east Asians, millions of Germans, Native Americans, and Africans. People around the world aren’t blind. They see our love affair with guns; the mass shootings of pre-schoolers; the extra-judicial executions of civilians by a militarized police force.
Rabid people like NRA gun nuts say the dead had it coming. Gun lovers have a duty to kill certain people to protect the world and our values. The way to stop a bad person with a gun is to give a good person a bigger gun. Some say the number of executions by USA military gun-toters exceeds sixty-five million souls during the modern era alone. The carnage that flows back to the eras of slavery and the Indian Wars is incalculable.
People fear our leaders, and they should. America is a handful of countries short of conquering the entire world. Under our new leadership the chances are good that every country will fall under our power sooner, not later.
Like ancient Rome, the United States has blood on its hands. We incarcerate millions of our own citizens in ratty prisons; tens-of-thousands rot in solitary confinement.
We have a moral obligation in victory to become better people as we rule the world and force our values on people who do not necessarily share all of them one-hundred percent.
We have unmatched power; America is on the cusp of living out its destiny in total victory, even as it dominates a world divided against itself, which is a road to ruin according to Christ Jesus — who all our political leaders say they worship — some at Congressional prayer breakfasts.
Yes, the president tried to get Speaker Ryan to fire the congressional chaplain. Yes, he canceled traditional Easter services at the White House. Well, they weren’t traditional. That black Muslim Obama started them. So it’s all good, right? Can we get an amen from the White House press corps? Why not!
Because the USA has unmatched power, the stable genius who leads may take it into World War III. The writer of his masterwork, Art of the Deal, said that if anyone starts a nuclear war, it will be the Donald.
Is anyone completely certain that when that war ends, it will be the USA who counts the bodies of the dead and writes their history? What if the other side counts our dead and writes our history? What then?
One thing about war is certain. The outcome is never certain. That chilling line from the screen play No Country for Old Men echoes in my head. In the contest between man and beast, the outcome is never certain. A rancher shot a cow with his rifle. The bullet ricocheted off its head and killed the rancher. The cow was fine.
In the end and over time, no one ever really wins at war. If history teaches anything, it teaches that war solves nothing. Yes the victor gets first dibs on the spoils, but in the war to come the spoils will be irradiated — poisoned by heavy metals.
Short of nuclear war, what can break America?
We have men on our side who are among the most powerful and dangerous who have ever walked on planet Earth. Imagine the scariest ISIS terrorist. We have men on our side who are scarier.
Felix Sater speaks fluent Russian, because he was born and raised in Moscow, Russia. He says that he and Michael Cohen became best friends after his sister and him were able to emigrate to America from Moscow via Israel when he was eight. During the process of switching countries Felix changed his Russian family name to Sater. Who knows why? Michael Cohen, by the way, is the president’s fixer and attorney, correct?
Felix Sater and the president are friends.
Felix changed his last name as a kind of joke, at least to my way of thinking. In the Kabbalah tradition, the Hebrew letters that spell Sater add to the number “666”. It’s the only Hebrew root word that adds to 666, so it’s easy to identify and remember.
It’s a word that means contrary, disheveled, or chaotic. It is a number made famous by the book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. Chaos is a sign of the anti-Christ.
666 Fifth Avenue is a property owned by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. He made the buy in 2007.
The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, bought the building “666 Fifth Avenue.” He and Sater thought it was funny, apparently. Maybe it is.
God doesn’t scare them. They’re bad boys, and they’ll mess up anyone who crosses them. It’s what they want everyone to think, anyway. When they hurt the little people, God looks the other way. They are sure of it.
Felix smashed a piece of cut glass into someone’s face during a bar-fight. He spent a year in prison for it. So yes, he is scary. He bilked investors out of forty-million dollars in Wall Street scams. I watched him apologize on national television to all those he ruined while insisting that today he loves and serves America. He is a changed man.
He might be. I’m not saying that he’s a liar, but when I listened to his explanation I was reminded of Michael Corleone in the movie, God Father Part Two, when he testified before a congressional committee.
Michael, some viewers might recall, was a Marine combat veteran, a defender of everything American, he told investigators. His reputation meant everything. Then again, he was a fictional character invented by the writer, Mario Puzo.
Sater is a close friend of the president. It’s true. The president has many powerful friends; some are family. His sister is a judge who sits on the second highest court in America — second only to the Supreme Court. His late uncle was an MIT professor.
NOTE BY EDITORS: In April 2019, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry retired from her position as a federal appellate judge for the state of New York.
In the 1960s and 1970s the government waged war against the Mafia in America. People got hurt. Many switched sides and made deals with the government to stay out of prison.
This cooperation started after Castro came to power in Cuba in the 1960s. The CIA teamed up with those Sicilian families who had lost their casinos in Cuba. The idea was to overthrow and assassinate Castro and the leaders of the Cuban revolution. The group had some successes.
The revolutionaries who were murdered are not known to most Americans, so I won’t identify any here. Readers can click on links at the end of this essay to learn more.
The CIA didn’t need the mafia to kill Che Guevara. They and the 1,800 special forces they trained in Guatemala were able to carry out that particular hit-job all by themselves with only the tiniest bit of encouragement from Rene Barrientos, the president of Bolivia where Che was found.
I’m not picking on Felix Sater. He didn’t start cooperating with the FBI until long after the war against the Sicilian mafia was mostly won. He has proved that he is untouchable and that he can engage and influence any power player anywhere on the world stage. But in a fight for the survival of our republic and the freedom that it promises ordinary people, are folks who seem to have no limits the best we have to defend us?
Are we truly defended, truly, for real, or are we undercut and subverted? Does right make might, or is it the other way around? I honestly don’t know. No one tells the truth about anything anymore, it seems.
Rome was an empire unchallenged for a thousand years. It’s in the history books, right? The empire fought its wars on its frontiers to protect its heart, as does the USA. In the end it fell, because a mob of barbarians walked into the capitol city with clubs and broom handles and the population hailed them as liberators.
The wealthy, most of them, lost everything, because the army that defended them ran like frightened rabbits from the conquering heroes who scared them with their hairy bodies, bad skin, and missing teeth. It took hundreds of years for the world to recover from that ancient catastrophe. Who knows if it’s true?
A catastrophe in the modern world with its biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons will be harder to endure. Does anyone agree?
I’m taking a knee, hands folded, head down. I’m believing that in the gut of every thinking person is the fear that no weapon in this world can protect any of us from what’s coming next.
Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, it’s moving fast. It’s strong. It’s scary. It makes the birds in the Sand Cherry trees outside the window chirp like monkeys.
It’s morning already. Bevy Mae is at the open window, She says the sun is shining. It was supposed to rain, according to Siri and Alexa.
How is it I haven’t slept and the time for sleeping is past?
Did you stay up all night again? Bevy Mae asks.
I feel good. I’m not tired. I reach for my wife. She pushes me away then tousles my hair. I see her Mona Lisa smile.
Nikki Haley, UN Ambassador, told the world that North Korea is begging for war. Her statement reminds me of the rape defense that bad men used in decades past at trial before court—she was begging for it, they would always insist.
The victim—always a woman—exercised her constitutional right to dress any way she chose. A prowling lunatic observed her and believed instead that she was advertising a willingness to copulate with a grease-ball, so he attacked.
In today’s United States the grease-ball defense no longer works. Women (and countries) have rights. The courts protect them, most of the time. When they don’t, women have recourse to civil suits.
Nikki Haley is the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India. Her mother once owned a clothing company, Exotica International, where Nikki worked as a bookkeeper starting at age 12. She served as governor of South Carolina until she became UN Ambassador in the Trump Administration. Note from the Editorial Board:Haley resigned her UN post on December 31, 2018.
All countries (and women) have the right to defend themselves. No one should have to say it. But the United States has mucked-up the waters of international affairs by waging preemptive wars against communist and socialist countries for the past seventy-five years. It seems like these wars will never end.
The policy of the United States is to undermine any country that espouses communism; it attacks using whatever methods are devised and recommended by the brilliant, depraved minds of our intelligence community. Despite all the evidence, despite all the complaints lodged against the United States before international courts and the United Nations, most Americans refuse to believe it.
The USA birthed its war-policy against collectivism in the early 1900s when the first communist revolutions undermined the noble classes of eastern Europe. The well-connected saw what happened in Russia and Hungary and decided to do something about it. Writers like Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), George Orwell (1984), and Ayn Rand (We the Living) wrote short, easy to read tracts that portrayed life under communism as a personality-destroying nightmare. The public ate it up.
After World War II, the job of suppression was handed over to our newly formed intelligence agencies who gave the fight its name: the Cold War. With the recent CIA assisted transformations of the Soviet Union and Red China into oligarchies (marking a putative end to the biggest conflicts) other terms have emerged from inside the intelligence community to describe how the USA is continuing to war against what few holdouts remain. The current buzz phrase is strategic strangulation.
Billionaires don’t look at the world in the same way as the disenfranchised and exploited. In the neglected and overlooked far reaches of the world where billionaires don’t live, common people sometimes try to organize themselves by producing wealth cooperatively and sharing it as best they can. Once they attract the attention of the powerful, the powerful send in missionaries and agricultural-aid workers to undermine and disenfranchise their leaders.
If God and food don’t work, they send in assassins. It’s true. Since WWII, the United States has gone to war with one out of four countries. It has overthrown (or co-opted) many states including Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Poland, Iraq, Afghanistan and dozens more.
Eventually, the USA sends in Coca-Cola and other first-line-of-attack companies to overwhelm the nascent economies of the sharers and cooperators. The wealthy move in to buy the arable land and lock up the country; billionaire power-brokers make it their business to bury every way of governance that might threaten their right to administer an economic empire built for one purpose only: to empower their own families and the families of their friends to rule unimpeded into perpetuity.
This billboard appears all over the island of Cuba. It says: BLOCKADE: THE LONGEST GENOCIDE IN HISTORY. It shows a Klansman’s noose strangling the island. Inside the USA intelligence community, it’s called strategic strangulation. Our leaders have enforced the embargo of Cuba for 55 years. Odds are it will never end.
The USA is good at undermining socialist countries. It’s why socialism doesn’t do well. When a communist country like Cuba manages to hold on somehow, they are tormented by embargos, infiltration by agents, sabotage, disinformation, slander, assassinations and so on. Radio Free Whatever is beamed into the targeted country to undermine morale and brainwash listeners with the most seductive psychological warfare techniques in our arsenal. It’s why communist countries seal their borders and jam our broadcasters.
The United States makes sure that no administrator can relax; none can kick back without constantly looking over their shoulder and keeping guard. As long as the privately-owned United States exists, countries of the opposite sex — that is, socialist countries — are going to get blamed for however the rich and powerful choose to hurt them. The better these socialist countries do for their people the bigger the target they become. Their success is their mini-skirt; their low-cut blouse. Obviously, they are begging for war as Madame Haley so eloquently put it.
Blaming the victim is as old as Cain and Abel. It’s as old as history. The bullies win. They put on coats and tails, send their kids to exclusive schools, learn to speak with a different accent, and set themselves apart. They tell wonderful stories about themselves on TV, movies, radio, books, magazines, and the internet until people start to actually believe deep in their hearts that wealthy people are more wonderfully made than themselves or their kids.
The poor and disadvantaged admire their employers, because no one is left to help them understand that they are slaves — fools before a noble class that thinks of them as having no more value than farm animals. They live in the cow-pastures outside the gates of the wealthy. A few unlucky cows get a glimpse from time to time of what has been stolen from them; most of the time they are too incredulous before the view to believe their own eyes.
Today, billionaires are planning as they have for the past seventy years to obliterate the North Koreans. Tens of millions of Koreans will die in the first hours. The North Koreans and their Chinese allies were the first countries to challenge America after WWII. Apparently, our arsenal of atomic weapons didn’t intimidate them. The USA has a long memory.
If we use nuclear weapons in a first strike, no one will live on the peninsula again. That this threat has been floated by our new president (fire and fury like the world has never known) makes it easy to understand what the USA is all about.
Despite denials in the press, America may in fact have neutron bombs in its arsenal which kill people but leave infrastructure intact outside the immediate impact zone. Only bunkers constructed from heavy concrete impregnated with barium sulfate can shield against both neutrons and the gamma ray by-products of collisions between neutrons and the proton-rich substrate of heavy concrete.
High level command bunkers are likely to be built with these materials. Otherwise elements like lead and heavy metals are the barriers of choice against most frequencies of nuclear radiation. But heavy metals tend to be transparent and ineffective against neutron bombardment.
Neutron bombs emit little residual radiation so they don’t contaminate the attack zone. An occupying force can be inserted with little risk of radiation poisoning. It’s possible the USA will use neutron bombs against civilians for the first time if the Koreans continue begging our country to kill them. A follow-on insertion of Marine and Airborne divisions would locate and destroy any surviving command bunkers.
The United States always seems to be first to try diabolical things. We used anthrax against Chinese troops during the Korean war back in the 1950s. Everyone knows about it but us of course. We have short memories when it comes to remembering our own sins like the genocidal Vietnam War and other cruelties such as the war against Iraq and the destabilization of the Middle East.
And no one seems to remember that it was a CIA agent (yes, he was disgruntled and no longer employed, the agency insists) who blew up the first commercial airliner and wiped out the Cuban Olympic fencing team. It was an act of terrorism that didn’t happen when you ask most Americans. Lee Harvey Oswald was also disgruntled and no longer employed, come to think of it.
Speaking of begging for war, is anyone out there begging for peace? The USA killed two million North Koreans during aerial bombardments approved by President Truman. What’s stopping us from doing it again?
During the first days of the Korean War, the South rounded up 100,000 of its own citizens and summarily executed them, believing that each of their victims might be a leftist sympathizer of the North. The Korean War was an atrocity — which I won’t devote blog space to explain or explore. Click on links, those who want to know more.
South Korea from North Korea’s point of view. A massive China has their back. South Korea’s capital is close to their border — a tempting target. (Click on map to produce full-size view in a new window.)
The point is, we aren’t listening to the North or South Koreans. Most want the peninsula unified. We don’t. Most folks want to live in a safe and fair place where billionaires don’t reduce the average person to poverty. South Korea doesn’t want us to sacrifice millions of its own citizens in a military strike against the North — possibly triggering a nuclear conflagration — to make a point. It’s simple, really.
The only sensible solution is to leave Korea and to assist reunification as best as we can if the sides invite us. We aren’t leaving obviously, because our policy is to topple socialism wherever it takes root.
In the past the USA demonized so many of its enemies that it has become more confusing for most folks to know who the bad guys are this time around. Immigrants to the Americas once labeled native Americans with the pejorative, savages. We exterminated their food supply (buffalos), then their men, women and children.
Right now, no one knows who to trust. With our new president we will never know what the facts are. We will never know for sure who is begging for war, us or them.
Billy Lee
From the EDITORIAL BOARD:
Billy Lee supports private and public ownership of property (a mixed economy) but advocates for internationally enforced limits on personal incomes and estate sizes to reduce the temptations that drive the wealthy to burn down democracy on altars of greed. Read Billy Lee’s essay Capitalism and Income Inequality.
Billy Lee opposes war on humanitarian grounds. During war people get killed and are maimed in huge numbers. It sometimes takes generations for both winners and losers to emerge from the trauma and horrors.
Billy Lee supports the United States during war but in peacetime reserves his constitutional right to pontificate freely.
Russian hypersonic ship killing missiles fired from submarines and jets pose an existential threat to the US Navy Fleet. From AP Photo.
UPDATE BY THE EDITORS: 5 AUGUST 2021; The Associated Press reported yesterday the following: A prospective Russian hypersonic missile has been successfully test-fired from a nuclear submarine for the first time, the military said Monday. The Russian Defense Ministry said that the Severodvinsk submarine performed two launches of the Zircon cruise missile at mock targets in the Barents Sea.
Editors Note: The January 16, 2018 edition of the New York Times reports that five Naval officers are being charged with negligent homicide related to the incidents described in this essay where seventeen sailors lost their lives, others were injured, and ships were damaged. The decision to take these officers to trial or court-martial is imminent.
The United States Navy insists that it has 277 ships on active-duty. About 132 are combat surface vessels; 75 or so are submarines. About 70 are logistical craft designed to supply the fleet.
Do the math. 132 surface ships patrol the oceans. Yes, the Navy says they have a fleet of 160 or so non-commissioned ships held in reserve, but they are unavailable and ineffective during first strike scenarios.
The New York Times agrees with the Navy. Everyone agrees — we have 277 ships. I hope the Navy and the New York Times are lying, because if they aren’t, we are in big trouble. We don’t have enough boats.
132 surface ships can’t control the Great Lakes, let alone the world’s seven oceans. Submarines, everyone knows, are almost useless except when used for nuclear deterrence.
The Navy’s Seventh Fleet is headquartered in Yokosuka, Japan. The fleet is responsible to cover 48 million square miles — from Japan to South Korea to Singapore, unless the faraway reaches of the South China Sea are included; then the square miles are too confusing for anyone to compute.
China claims the whole of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory, including all reefs, atolls, and islands.
How many ships bear the awesome duty to keep the sea-lanes open and safe from pirates and hostile powers like North Korea? The Navy says, 70. The USA deploys one aircraft carrier and 69 ships.
Some news outlets have reported that an additional carrier group has been sent into the Sea of Japan to augment the current force configuration. A typical carrier strike group consists of eleven vessels, two of which are submarines. So, the total on the date of this essay might be as high as 81.
Sorry, but someone is ordering our sailors to do an impossible job. The job is too big, the resources are too thin, and guess what?
A flotilla of 81 vessels scurrying about the South China Sea to keep a lid on China, which is seizing islands that belong to Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines as they build and fortify new ones wherever they want is more than enough problems to exhaust any navy. People get tired. Accidents happen.
We have 70 ships in theater, the Navy says. We probably have 81. What does the other side have?
Well, we don’t really know. They lie. So do we. But we and they both watch; and we and they both spy and calculate.
Hillary Clinton — once upon a time (anyone remember?) she had the security-clearance to know — during a 2016 presidential debate let slip that Russian drone submarines are patrolling our coasts. These are cheap subs that sail apparently with no crews on board.
She said it once. Her assertion was never repeated in the press or public media. Everyone pretended they didn’t hear, for good reason. The number and types of ships in the Russian and Chinese fleets that are arrayed against our tiny arsenal of boats are state secrets. It’s all classified — out of reach of everyone except those with a clearance and a need to know.
Chinese frigates like this one often stalk US ships in the South China Sea.
It seems clear to more than a few casual observers of Chinese shipping that the Chinese are building the most high-tech navy the world has ever seen. They have been building it for a few decades now.
The Chinese have practiced their sea-going skills in coordination with the Russian navy since 2012. Last year the Russians and Chinese held joint naval exercises in the South China Sea, of all places. Joint land-based military exercises started in 2007.
China is selling its naval technologies and hardware to smaller countries that don’t normally threaten us. Thailand is buying Chinese subs. With military hi-tech weapons spread among a dozen or more countries in secret alliances with China… well… if it’s happening more than we know, does anyone think it’s good for our side?
But really, what would any reasonable person suspect are the forces arrayed against us? Look around. Hundreds-of-thousands of Russians live on the island of Cuba ninety miles from the United States.
Upscale area southwest of the airport in Havana, Cuba. (From Google Earth. Street View not available.)
Go on Google Earth and look at the Cuban neighborhoods. Some nice ones have Russian street names. It’s true. The Russians have a number of wonderfully designed, modern military bases for both subs and ships; and — oh yeah — they have fighter jets and missiles, as well.
Does anyone disagree? Go look.
Am I trying to scare people?
Doesn’t the public have enough to fear? Isn’t terrorism, immigration, climate change, distant war, disease, and precarious health care that could collapse now that the GOP is in charge enough to worry about? Of course it is.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson helped Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin build Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure. It is the world’s best. Note from the Editors:Tillerson resigned his post on March 31, 2018.
Besides, our country has thousands of nuclear weapons buried hundreds of feet below the cornfields and deserts of the heartland to extinguish any threats, should we lose our Navy. Until the missiles rot and their plutonium payloads leech into our soils, why worry?
Everyone should sleep well at night, right? Who wants to alarm anyone? I don’t.
Secretary of State Tillerson said we should sleep well, so why not? He knows all about the Russians, having helped them build their oil industry over many decades.
Depending on when anyone takes its measure, Russia’s energy industry is the world’s largest and most productive — bigger than Saudi Arabia’s. People don’t believe it, but it’s true.
Russia is the world’s biggest oil and natural gas producer and exporter. Secretary Tillerson must know what he’s talking about, right?
Well, here is some stuff that is not so comforting. It might scare some people. Between 1975 and 2016 (41 years) our Navy experienced nine accidents, mostly between our own ships. Only two accidents involved the boats of foreign countries. That’s not bad. That’s not the scary part. But hear me out.
The Ehime Maru was on a 74-day voyage to train high school students to become commercial fishermen when it was struck on 9 February 2001 by a US submarine. It sank. Of the 35 on board, nine died, including four teenagers.
In 2001 a Japanese fishing-training boat, the Ehime Maru, with thirty-five Japanese citizens aboard, was obliterated near the Hawaiian island of Oahu when the commanding officer of one of our attack submarines allegedly hot-dogged the craft for civilian joy-riders.
Our new president, George W. Bush, went on national TV to apologize to the Japanese, and the United States paid huge fines and compensation to the Japanese government and the grieving families of the nine who died, which included four high school students.
In 2004, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy ran over an Arab sailboat in the Persian Gulf. 15 people died, but the Navy didn’t identify who they were it seems, and no one was compensated, as far as I know. Two jet fighters parked on deck were damaged. The Navy relieved the commanding officer.
USS Belknap, guided-missile cruiser, destroyed in 1975 near Sicily.
The most serious accident was in 1975 when the same U.S.S. John F. Kennedy hit one of our own guided-missile cruisers, the USSBelknap, off the island of Sicily. The Belknap was completely destroyed; seven sailors died.
A fire burned on the Belknap for twenty hours just a few yards from the magazine where Terrier surface-to-air missiles were stored. The ship was constructed with aluminum, which caught fire. The entire above deck structure melted. It took nearly five years to reconstruct the ruined cruiser. In 1995, the Navy struck it from the Naval Registry and began using it for target practice. They sunk it during a live-fire exercise in 1998.
A year after the Belknap accident, the USS John F. Kennedy collided with another ship, this time the aging USS Bordelon destroyer during a refueling. The Navy struck the ship from its registry and sold it to Iran for parts in 1977. No one died.
So, during the forty-one years between 1975 and 2016, the US Navy had nine peacetime accidents, seven of which were friendly-fire and self-inflicted. 24 foreign nationals died; 7 U.S. sailors; 1 U.S. civilian. Ship losses: one cruiser and one obsolete destroyer. Maybe other losses occurred. I haven’t heard about them, if there were any.
The USS John S. McCain collided with a Liberian oil tanker, the Alnic MC, on August 20, 2017 in an early morning incident that killed ten sailors. The crash took the destroyer out of action for at least one year.
And now comes the scary part; hold onto your pants: In the seven months since the inauguration of our comb-over commander-in-chief (and keeper of nuclear codes), the U.S. Navy has suffered four major accidents, which killed 17 sailors and injured scores more.
It’s lost two of its most powerful missile-guided destroyers — the U.S.S. Fitzgerald and the U.S.S. John S. McCain. It might be years before they are back in service. Readers can read about the fates of the USS Antietam and the USS Lake Chaplain in the links below.
At least two dozen sailors and officers have been disciplined, including a Vice-Admiral, a Commander, and a Lieutenant Commander. Admiral John Richardson, chief of Naval operations, has ordered an “operational pause” to all fleet commanders. He’s ordered a months-long review of protocols, because, he says, “there’s something out there that we’re not getting at.”
All this commotion is happening during a time when we’re planning to conduct war games against North Korea and are daily challenging the Chinese in the South China Sea.
Can I put things into perspective? If the accident rate of the past seven months was applied to the past forty-one years, the U.S. Navy would be short another 85 ships and 800 sailors. Thousands more young men and women would be maimed and wounded, and 250 promising Naval careers would be wrecked.
In peacetime, essentially, the U.S. Navy might have lost one-third of its fleet and some of its best sailors and officers at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.
The USS Antietam, a guided missile cruiser, grounded itself in Tokyo Bay January 31, 2017. It released over one thousand gallons of toxic hydraulic oil into the bay and damaged both of its propellers and propeller hubs. Repair costs will exceed $4 million.
Here are a few of the headlines from our country’s newspaper of record, the New York Times. All headlines are from articles written in 2017. I’ve read every single one of them. Readers can access their content by clicking on the links. The remainder of my essay is written below these headlines:
*Some readers may have noticed that the last headline seems to have no connection whatsoever to this essay. But they would be wrong.
Recall that the battleship USSIndianapolis was the fiercest war machine we had during World War II in the Pacific. We used that ship to deliver the atomic bomb Little Boy (dropped on Hiroshima) to Tinian Island in the western Pacific Ocean sometime during July, 1945. It would be assembled and delivered to the Japanese people with terrifying effect on August 15.
From Tinian the Navy ordered the Indianapolis to advance to Leyte Island in the Philippines to prepare for an all-out assault and invasion of Japan scheduled to follow the atomic blasts that were soon to occur.
On July 30 the lumbering battleship encountered a Japanese submarine which delivered six torpedoes in the wee hours of the night. The sub commander later said that the clouds parted, which permitted the Indianapolis to be silhouetted by moon-light. It made targeting easy. Two torpedo struck the Indianapolis.
The ammunition on board caught fire and blew-off the front quarter. It took twelve minutes for the battleship to sink below the surface. The ship sucked four hundred men to the bottom and left behind an oil slick that would sicken and blind many of the nearly one-thousand sailors and marines who survived to face death by dehydration, drowning, and sharks.
The USS Indianapolis delivered the atomic bomb to the Air Force in the Pacific before being sunk by a Japanese submarine. The ordeal took the lives of nearly a thousand men during five days in the open sea. Read Devil’s Voyage by Jack L Chalker.
The Navy didn’t notice that their prized battleship was missing. After five days of vomiting, diarrhea, hallucinations, and shark attacks, three hundred men were still alive (some in lifeboats, including the Commanding Officer) when an aircraft on an unrelated mission saw something suspicious and flew down to take a closer look.
Twenty-two men who were pulled from the water remain alive today. The Navy court-martialed the commander, Captain McVay, and convicted him for not zig-zagging as he sailed. The Japanese sub-commander testified that zig-zagging would not have mattered. The Indianapolis was going to the floor of the ocean, in any event, he insisted. Nothing could have stopped what happened.
Losing a ship, even in war, is a big deal in the Navy. It’s not something that anyone takes lightly, even when there are extenuating circumstances and good reasons for failure. Captain McVay committed suicide in 1968—clutching a toy sailor in one hand and his service revolver in the other.
The Navy has a history of not being able to keep track of its ships. The earth’s oceans are vast, and we don’t have that many boats on them. Hiding ships from our enemies means we sometimes hide them from ourselves.
Civilian boats are another matter. Merchant fleets deploy 51,405 ships on our oceans. Most of them are bigger and longer and heavier than our 277 Navy ships. Almost all run on auto-pilot most of the time, especially at night when the crews sleep. If the computer directs the tanker to ram a boat like the Fitzgerald, that’s what is going to happen. In collisions, chances are Navy ships will lose.
Collision avoidance should be easy. Crews need only have situational awareness and the ability to steer the boat. The problem is that to perform these tasks crews rely on a complicated matrix of technologies that always seem to fail in critical situations like combat or rule violations by other boats.
These technologies should be used to confirm human observation and decisions; instead sailors confirm what the technology tells them, but only when something goes wrong, which is almost always too late. An alarm sounds and a glance at a computer screen shows that a tanker is 500 meters to starboard, so a crew member looks out a window to see if it’s there. No! That’s bassackwards and will get someone killed.
Officers might better demonstrate proficiency in the absence of high-tech aids for situational awareness and steering, then add high-tech proficiencies one skill-set at a time. Maybe they wear merit badges to enable COs to tell at a glance who can handle hydraulic controls and who is good at computer-aided navigation, for example.
Every officer doesn’t have to master every skill-set, and the least skilled officer should be able to turn off the high-tech systems they haven’t mastered in order to steer the boat and stop it using the skills they do have, when necessary.
Laser distance finders (like those used by golfers) and wide-field-of-view night vision binoculars should be standard issue. A half dozen or more sailors should be stationed around the perimeter of every boat and be required to report what they see or don’t see every five minutes or so. No snoozing!
Mischief Reef is the site of a Chinese airstrip and military installation built on a contested atoll in the Philippines.
Anyway, one thing about the four accidents this year (January 31, the USS Antietam; May 9, the USS Lake Champlain; June 17, the USS Fitzgerald; August 20, the USS John S. McCain) bothers me: the destroyer McCain was nearly sunk just two weeks after it challenged the Chinese at a contested atoll named Mischief Reef, which the Chinese have in recent years built-up into a military base.
I have a problem with coincidences that turn out bad for our side. Malevolent intent by an adversary is always possible. Every bridge officer should understand the protocols to avoid intentional (or unintentional) collisions initiated by rogue (or wayward) boats.
A Philippine-manned cargo ship, the ACX Crystal, rammed the USS Fitzgerald, a guided-missile destroyer, on June 17, 2017. Seven US sailors died. The night was clear; the seas calm. The commanding officer and another crew member were severely injured. Repairs will cost hundreds of millions and take years to complete.
Our Navy is a mess. Everyone knows it. The optics of powerful warships limping into port under the power of a dozen or so tugboats emboldens our enemies and demoralizes our patriotic fighting men and women.
We have the wrong ships, designed the wrong way, for the wrong wars, for the wrong reasons. And our Navy is overworked to the max. We all know it’s true. It doesn’t have to be. It’s good to have high-tech systems, but they are useless during a crisis. Everyone must be proficient at low-tech and know how to enable it. Seriously.
Politics and corruption, profiteering and greed, laziness and lack of zeal are going to kill us all if we don’t wake up. It’s time for civilians to step up and defend our way of life. It’s time for corporations and billionaires to do what’s right — not what makes them wealthy at the expense of our country’s defense and the prosperity of our citizens and the people of the world who are looking to us for leadership.
We are going to regret privatizing our military and using contractors instead of citizens to fight our battles. We are going to lose our freedoms and our country if we don’t fight for both. Everyone must do their part. Corruption can have no role in the process.
We must use our power to make the world safer, freer, and better for everyone, not just ourselves. People are sick and tired of “America first.” We have so much, already.
It’s time to share our advantages, with love. If we do what’s right, if we embrace public service and reach out to the disadvantaged in the world (the military, after all, doesn’t have the room or the money for every citizen), we won’t need to kill everyone who hates us like we’ve been doing for hundreds of years.
A year or two of public service by every American in impoverished neighborhoods and blighted communities might make a big difference in the why, how, and who we fight.
