Caitlin Johnstone today:
The US House of Representatives has voted 368-57 to spend $40 billion on a world-threatening proxy war while ordinary Americans struggle to feed themselves and their children. All 57 “no” votes were Republicans. Every member of the small faction of progressive House Democrats popularly known as “The Squad” voted yes.
The massive proxy war bill then went to the Senate, where it was stalled with scrutiny not from progressive superstar Bernie Sanders, but from Republican Rand Paul.
And take note of another of her pithy summaries a few days earlier, cited in a recent post here:
The US doesn’t have political parties, it has narrative control ops disguised as political parties. One of them overtly promotes capitalism and imperialism by appealing to Americans’ worst impulses, the other covertly diverts healthy impulses back into capitalism and imperialism.
An elephant and a donkey fight in a puppet show and the crowd cheers for one or the other while thieves pick their pockets. And when people start to notice their wallets are missing, they’re told they can stop the pickpocketing by cheering louder for their favorite puppet.
People ask why the Democrats never codified Roe vs Wade into law, and the answer is, because that’s not their job. Their job is not to enact the policies you elected them to enact. Their job is not even to win elections. Their job is to keep you staring at the puppet show while the empire has its way with the world.
Y’all have yourselves a good weekend, folks.
* * *
Its the practical knock on impact of insufficiently robust, and therefore collapsing, systems unable to take the strain of criminally insane decision making based on the notion among those decision makers that it is possible to create your own reality which very few seem to be recognising – never mind tackling.
As Micheal Hudson, in a recent interview notes, the West has thrown the kitchen sink at Russia in an attempt to destroy its economy which is backfiring spectacularly.
The blowback in Europe particularly is likely to be catastrophic. With the drop in food production impacting with price rises, shortages, and a refugee exodus to Europoe from the Near East and North Africa heading towards biblical proportions meeting self inflicted price rises of energy in a vicious feedback loop.
Should there be reciprocal retaliation from Russia, as Gonzalo Lira believes will be the case here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXnOFXUmVv0
in which ‘unfriendly countries’ in the West are cut off from materials and energy vital for their continued existence, (assuming Europe does not do it to itself) there is every likelihood of a wider systemic collapse of a broad range of systems. With energy and food shortages leading to blackouts and empty shelves. Producing empty stomachs and empty fuel pipes.
Even in a best case scenario is there anyone who has been paying attention who has any confidence whatsoever in anyone across the Western elites having the ability to deal with such practicalities? In the UK alone – and its possible to go through the same exercise with France, Germany, Italy, Spain et al – can anyone (does anyone want to) imagine anyone, be it Johnson, Starmer, Sturgeon and their teams having the ability, nous and gumption to organise food or fuel rationing? They couldn’t even deal with a pandemic with any effectiveness.
Its times like this that one remembers practical lessons from military training – like the five P’s – Prior Preparation Prevents Piss-poor Performance.
Meanwhile I read today [article dated May 5} that the US were passing a bill allowing themselves to:
“change U.S. antitrust law to revoke the sovereign immunity that has long protected OPEC and its national oil companies from lawsuits.
If signed into law, the U.S. attorney general would gain the ability to sue the oil cartel or its members, such as Saudi Arabia, in federal court. Other producers like Russia, which works with OPEC in wider group known as OPEC+ to withhold output, could also be sued.”
Presumably, this wanting your cake and eating it legislation seeks to sanction Russian oil from entering the West whilst at the same time taking upon itself to sue Russia/Russian companies for not giving it away for free?
The level of self entitlement is off the scale and would make Marie Antoinette blush.
If the West were a child behaving in such a mardy arsed manner you’d give it a good slap round the legs (though I understand such remembered sanctions from childhood days are somewhat frowned upon these days).
As it is the West seems to be operating to the template of the film ‘Idiocracy.’
What regards itself as ‘the left’ seems irreparably compromised. Trapped like a rabbit in headlights unable to think, never mind act or operate, in a coherent and consistent manner congruent with its rational materialist tradition.
Keep taking the Red Pill.
Hello WWIII. I would have liked to see a few more of my novels published, but I fear the only lining to come is mushroom clouds in the sky.