Blowback only hits the little guy

At least it’s easier to stay on top of things this time. You don’t have to dig down to get to the truth. The press conferences are more open and to the point. You don’t have to ask yourself what they’re really saying. They’re saying it. What they’re saying is horrible enough. If they’re lying to cover up something even more horrible and illegal, it almost doesn’t even matter.

Try and stop us

The U.S. President just says that the U.S. owns other countries, like Venezuela. It’s not true in any realistic sense, but that’s what they like to think has happened, that’s what they want you to believe has happened, so that you can help them make it part of the mass delusion that is the reality of the U.S. one quarter of the way through the 21st century.

Trump says that the U.S. took it for the oil And that they’re going to give the oil to the corporations.

All of that is essentially verbatim. I’m not misrepresenting them.

So, now the U.S. doesn’t pay for things or do stupid stuff like “trade”. It just takes what it wants because it’s strong. OK. It’s been like that for a long time, but they used to dress it up a bit.

And they’re doing all this to corner the market on the dirtiest fossil fuel on the planet: Venezuelan crude, to keep it out of the hands of the Chinese and the Indians. So the U.S. commits war crimes by attacking Venezuela to steal its oil so it can make already fattened U.S. corporations even fatter by polluting the atmosphere and warming the planet even more? Jesus wept.

Is the mask off? Was it already off?

The article The US Empire Needs Men Like Trump by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack) writes about the dynamic at play here. How much has actually changed from before? How different is the Trump administration? In which ways?

“If you were wondering why the US establishment was so much more chill about Trump becoming president this term than they were the first time around, you’re watching the reason now. The powers that be were assured that he’d carry out longstanding imperial agendas like kidnapping Maduro, bombing Iran and overseeing a final solution to the Palestinian problem, and they trusted him to carry out those plans.”

Very good people like Vijay Prashad concur, saying that this isn’t a “mask-off” moment because the mask has always been off. But I think that he’s making the same mistake that other clever people make: he’s assuming that since he knew that the mask was off a long time ago, that other people also know that.

With “mask off,” I mean that most U.S.-Americans will no longer be able to deny that they are toppling other countries’ governments for their own gain. The administration isn’t even claiming to have done it for Democracy. They did it to steal resources that they don’t need but that they want to control, in order to strangle other countries (Cuba, China). More people are in on it now; that’s what “mask off” means.

Look at this post.

This is our hemisphere

That was published under the imprimatur of the Department of State of the United States.

How does it differ in any way from the T-Shirt that Homer wore in Blame it on Lisa (Wikipedia) in S13E15 of the Simpsons, broadcast in 2002?[1]

Try and stop us

There’s no way to pretend that the U.S. doesn’t think of itself as an empire now. You have to either disavow this administration or go all-in that you’re for empire and subjugation of other nations. You have to declare that you’re an immoral criminal with no principles.

If you don’t stop pretending, then you end up basically agreeing with Lindsey Graham. You have to think he’s a smart, well-informed, deeply moral, and loving Christian. That’s what you have to do because that’s what you stand for. You have to put your bloody signature on idiocy like the stuff below.

““Cuba is ready to fall,” Trump told the press on Sunday next to a delighted Lindsey Graham. “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall. I don’t know if they’re going to hold out. But Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from their Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil. They’re not getting any of it. And Cuba is literally ready to fall.””

Can we please stop talking about Cuba collapsing on its own? It’s not collapsing on its own. It’s being strangled to death. This is the United States doing to Cuba what Israel is doing to Gaza. The United States has convinced the world that laying siege to a nation by starving it to death is not an act of war. So the United States convinces the world to repeat its idiocies, even people who are actively against the policies.

They are accepting the framing. We have to work incredibly hard to recognize the framing and impose our own.

People like Lindsey Graham help because, unlike Trump, who’s willing to promulgate the lie that Cuba is going to “fall on its own,” Graham can’t help himself because he’s a demon. He positively loves thinking about all of the stupid Cuban communists who are going to die for their dream, making way for his beautiful U.S. corporations to make money. He only hopes that the stronger ones survive as a cheap or slave labor force.

““You just wait for Cuba,” Graham added. “Cuba is a Communist dictatorship that’s killed priests and nuns, they preyed on their own people. Their days are numbered. We’re gonna wake up one day, I hope in ’26, in our backyard we’re gonna have allies in these countries doing business with America, not narcoterrorist dictators killing Americans.”

““Donald Trump will have done something that’s eluded America since the fifties: deal with the Communist dictatorship 90 miles off the coast of Florida,” Graham said on Fox News. “I can’t wait till that day comes. To our Cuban friends in Florida and throughout America, the liberation of your homeland is close.””

And this kind of framing is everywhere. On Iran, they’re no longer talking about a fictitious nuclear-weapons program. Trump claimed half a year ago that he’d destroyed that program, so it would be difficult, even for him, to claim that they still had the program without looking weak himself. So the next pivot is to demand that Iran no longer be able to defend itself at all.

“Prior to that Trump had confirmed to the press that the US would attack Iran if it tried to rebuild its missile program, saying in a joint news conference with Benjamin Netanyahu that “I hope they’re not trying to build up again because if they are, we’re going have no choice but very quickly to eradicate that buildup.”

“[…] the president is not talking about attacking Iran if it tries to rebuild its nuclear facilities or construct a nuclear weapon. He’s talking about Iran’s conventional ballistic missile program. The United States is saying that Iran simply is not allowed to defend itself in any way, shape or form, and that if it tries to rebuild its ability to do so it will be attacked again.”

This should be a fun ride. Watch out for the blowback, USA.

Although, how would you even know if there were blowback? Can you tell the difference between foreign militants kidnapping people off of and shooting people in the streets and what ICE is doing?

The U.S.—and, frankly, most of the West—is so broken that it would celebrate Jack the Ripper today for “cleaning up the streets.” Might makes right as official policy. They are the absolute worst.

These are the violent shudderings, the death-throes of an empire.

I often think of the US as the vanquished Balrog in the Lord of the Rings. It falls, presumably to its death or banishment, but its whip lashes back up to pull down the bridge with Gandalf on it. It’s going down, but it’s still so dangerous.

Just because empires inevitably die, the flailing of a dying empire was never going to be pleasant. It’s going to get messier.