Instruction: Write an article about: CIA director admits media myth ‘Havana Syndrome’ is not foreign attack. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: CIA, Havana Syndrome, Robert Bartholomew, William Burns

Output:
CIA Director William Burns admitted that US spies and diplomats suffering from “Havana Syndrome” were not attacked by a foreign country like Russia, China, or Cuba, and there are normal medical explanations.

Top Western corporate media outlets have spent years spreading a conspiracy theory called “Havana Syndrome,” claiming without any evidence that Russia, China, and/or Cuba were systematically attacking US spies and diplomats with futuristic microwave technology and directed-energy weapons.
The CIA itself admitted in January 2022 that there was absolutely no proof of this, and its scientific experts concluded that Havana Syndrome is not caused by attacks by foreign adversaries. They found normal medical explanations for the condition’s very vague symptoms.
CIA Director William Burns himself has now publicly acknowledged that Havana Syndrome is not a result of attacks, in comments first reported by Kawsachun News.

In an interview with NBC News Correspondent Andrea Mitchell at the Aspen Security Forum on July 20, the CIA director rejected the myriad mainstream media articles that blamed Havana Syndrome on Russia, China, and/or Cuba.
“We don’t assess that a foreign player or the Russians or anyone else is behind or is responsible for a sustained global campaign on the scale of what has been reported to harm U.S. personnel, with a weapon or some kind of external device,” Burns said.
“In the majority of incidents – and we’ve, you know, investigated each one as thoroughly as we possibly can, and we’re still working on a number of them – that, you know, you could find reasonable alternative explanations, whether it was other environmental factors, or preexisting medical conditions, or other kind of medical explanations,” he added.
Geopolitical Economy Report documented some of the blatantly false Havana Syndrome conspiracies spread by major corporate media outlets.
CIA’s ‘Havana Syndrome’ conspiracy implodes: Here are media’s worst fake news stories

In January, Geopolitical Economy Report interviewed Doctor Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist and leading expert on mass hysteria and social panics.
In 2020, Bartholomew published a book titled “Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria,” which accurately predicted that the condition was psychological and was not caused by foreign attacks.


Instruction: Write an article about: Why does the US support Israel? A geopolitical analysis with economist Michael Hudson. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran, Israel, Michael Hudson, Middle East, oil, Saudi Arabia, West Asia

Output:
A geopolitical analysis of why the United States so strongly supports Israel: Economist Michael Hudson discusses with journalist Ben Norton.

Why does the United States so strongly support Israel? Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton interviewed economist Michael Hudson to explore the reasons why Israel is such an important part of U.S. foreign policy and Washington’s attempt to dominate not only the region of the Middle East, but the entire world.

Israel is an extension of U.S. geopolitical power in one of the most critically important regions of the world.
In fact, it was current U.S. President Joe Biden, back in 1986, when he was a senator, who famously said that, if Israel didn’t exist, the United States would have to invent it:
If we look at the Middle East, I think it’s about time we stop, those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel in this body, for apologizing for our support for Israel.
There is no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make.
Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region; the United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.
I am with my colleagues who are on the floor of the Foreign Relations Committee, and we worry at length about NATO; and we worry about the eastern flank of NATO, Greece and Turkey, and how important it is. They pale by comparison…
They pale by comparison in terms of the benefit that accrues to the United States of America.
It goes without saying that the so-called Middle East, or a better term is West Asia, has some of the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas, and the entire world’s economic infrastructure relies heavily on fossil fuels.
The planet is gradually moving toward new energy sources, which is needed to fight climate change, but fossil fuels are still absolutely critical to the global economy. And Washington’s goal has been to make sure that it can maintain steady prices in global oil and gas markets.
But this is about something much bigger than just oil and gas. The U.S. military’s stated policy since the 1990s, since the end of the Cold War and the overthrow of the Soviet Union, is to try to maintain control over every region of the world.
This was stated clearly in 1992 in the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine. The U.S. National Security Council wrote:
[The United States’] goal is to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests, and also thereby to strengthen the barriers against the reemergence of a global threat to the interests of the U.S. and our allies. These regions include Europe, East Asia, the Middle East/Persian Gulf, and Latin America. Consolidated, nondemocratic control of the resources of such a critical region could generate a significant threat to our security.
Then, in 2004, the U.S. government published its National Military Strategy, in which Washington stressed that its goal was “Full Spectrum Dominance – the ability to control any situation or defeat any adversary across the range of military operations”.
Historically, when it came to West Asia, the U.S. relied on a so-called “twin pillar” strategy. The west pillar was Saudi Arabia, and the east pillar was Iran.
Until the 1979 revolution, Iran was governed by a shah, a dictatorial monarch who was backed by the United States and served U.S. interests in the region.
However, following the 1979 revolution, the U.S. lost one of the pillars of its twin pillar strategy, and Israel became increasingly important for the United States to maintain control over this crucially strategic region.
Many of the world’s top oil and gas producers are located in West Asia.

Furthermore, some of the most important trading routes on Earth go through this region.
It would be difficult to overstate how important Egypt’s Suez Canal is. It connects trade transiting from West Asia going into Europe, from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean.
Around 30% of all of the world’s shipping containers pass through the Suez Canal. That represents around 12% of the total global trade of all goods.
Then, directly south of the Suez Canal, where the Red Sea enters the Arabian Sea, there is a crucial geostrategic choke point known as the Bab al-Mandab Strait, off the coast of Yemen. There, more than 6 million barrels of oil pass through every single day.

Historically, the United States has tried to dominate this region in order to maintain control of energy supplies and ensure these global trade routes that the globalized capitalist system is built on.
As U.S. influence in the region has weakened in an increasingly multipolar world, Israel has become even more important for the United States to try to exercise hegemony in the region.
One can see this clearly in the discussions over oil prices in OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which has essentially been expanded to OPEC+ to include Russia.
Today, Saudi Arabia and Washington’s archenemy, Russia, play a key role in determining global oil prices.
Historically, Saudi Arabia was a loyal U.S. proxy, but Riyadh has increasingly pursued a more non-aligned foreign policy. And a very big reason for that is that China is now the biggest trading partner of many of the countries in the region.
For a decade, China has been the largest importer of oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, whereas U.S. oil imports peaked in 2005.
Due to massive expansion of production and the shale boom in the 2010s, the United States established itself as one of the top three oil producers on Earth, reducing its need for crude from Persian Gulf.
Meanwhile, through its global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China is moving the center of world trade back to Asia. And the “road” in BRI is a reference to the New Silk Road.

Can you guess which region is crucial in the New Silk Road and the BRI? Of course, it’s the Middle East – or, again, a better name is West Asia, and that term actually much better explains the geostrategic importance of this region, because it connects Asia to Europe.
This explains why the United States has been so desperate to try to challenge the Belt and Road with its own attempts to build new trade routes. In particular, the U.S. seeks to make a trade route going from India into the Persian Gulf, and then up through Israel.
So in all of these projects, Israel plays an important role, as an extension of U.S. imperial power in one of the most important regions of the world. That is why Biden said back in 1986 that if Israel didn’t exist, the U.S. would have to invent it.
That is also why Biden repeated this in a White House meeting with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog on October 27, 2022:
We’re also going to discuss the ironclad commitment – and this is, I’ll say this 5000 times in my career – the ironclad commitment the United States has to Israel, based on our principles, our ideas, our values; they’re the same values.
And I have often said, Mr. President [Herzog], if there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.
And even as recently as October 18, 2023, Biden again repeated the same thing in a speech he made in Israel: “I have long said, if Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it”.
In that speech in 2023, Biden traveled to Israel in order to support the country as it was carrying out a brutal bombing campaign in Gaza, and ethnically cleansing Palestinians as part of what legal experts around the world have referred to as a “textbook case of genocide”.
Top United Nations experts have warned that the Palestinian people are in danger of genocide by Israel.
And the United States has steadfastly been supporting Israel, because, as Joe Biden said, Israel is an extension of U.S. imperial power in West Asia, and if it didn’t exist, Washington would have to invent it.

Below follows a transcript of the interview that Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton conducted with economist Michael Hudson, author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.
BEN NORTON: Michael, thanks for joining me today. We are speaking on November 9, and the latest death toll in the war in Gaza is that Israel has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians.
The United Nations has referred to Gaza as a “graveyard for children”. More than 4,000 children have been killed. About 40% of the casualties are children.
And the United States has continued to support Israel, not only diplomatically and politically, not only by, for instance, vetoing resolutions in the U.N. Security Council that call for a ceasefire, but furthermore, the U.S. has been sending billions of dollars to Israel.
Not only the $3.8 billion that the U.S. always gives to Israel every year in military aid, but additionally, tens of billions of dollars more.
So I am wondering if you could provide your analysis of why you think the U.S. is investing so many resources in supporting Israel while it is clearly committing war crimes.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, certainly it is supporting Israel, but it’s not supporting Israel because this is an altruistic act.
To the United States, Israel is its landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Israel is the takeoff point for America to control the Near East.
And from the very time there was talk of creating an Israel, it was always that Israel was going to be an outpost, first of England, then of Russia, then of the United States in the Near East.
And I can give you an anecdote. Netanyahu’s main national security advisor for the last few years has been Uzi Arad. I worked at the Hudson Institute for about five years, 1972 to ‘76. And I worked very closely with Uzi there.
Uzi and I made two trips to Korea and Japan to talk about international finance. So we had a good chance to get to know each other. And on one trip, we stopped over from New York to San Francisco. And in San Francisco, there was a party or a gathering for people to meet us.
And one of the U.S. generals came over and slapped Uzi on the back and said, you’re our landed aircraft carrier over there. We love you.
Well, I could see Uzi feeling, tightening up and getting very embarrassed and didn’t really have anything to say. But the United States has always viewed Israel as just our foreign military base, not Israel.
So of course, it wants to secure this military base.
But when England first passed the act saying there should be in Israel the Balfour Declaration, it was because Britain wanted to control the Near East and its oil supplies.
When Israel was formed in the United Nations, the first country to recognize it was Stalin and Russia, who thought that Russians were going to have a major influence over Israel.
And then after that, of course, when Truman came in, the military immediately saw that America was replacing England as the chief of the Near East. And that was even after the fight, the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953.
So from the United States, it’s not Israel’s wagging the American tail, just the opposite. You mentioned that America is supporting Israel. I don’t think America is supporting Israel at all, nor do most Israelis, nor do most Democrats.
America is supporting Netanyahu. It’s supporting Likud, not Israel. The majority of Israelis, certainly the non-religious Israelis, the core population of Israel since its founding, is opposing Likud and its policies.
And so what really is happening is that to the United States, Netanyahu is the Israeli version of Zelensky in the Ukraine.
And the advantage of having such an unpleasant, opportunist, and corrupt person as Netanyahu, who is under indictment for his bribery and corruption, is precisely that all of the attention now of the whole world that is so appalled by the attacks going on in Gaza, they’re not blaming the United States.
They’re blaming Israel. They’re blaming Netanyahu and Israel for it, when it’s the United States that has been sending plane load after plane load of bombs, of guns. There are 22,000 machine guns, automatic guns, that are banned for sale in the United States that America is sending for the settlers to use on the West Bank.
So there’s a pretense of good cop, bad cop. You have Mr. Blinken telling Netanyahu, when you bomb hospitals, make sure you do it according to the rules of war. And when you kill 100,000 Gaza children, make sure it’s all legal and in the war. And when you talk about ethnic cleansing and driving a population out, make sure that it’s all done legal.
Well, of course, it’s not the rules of war, and there are war crimes being committed, but the United States is pretending to tell Netanyahu and the Israeli government, use smaller bombs. Be more gentle when you bomb the children in the hospital, when actually this is all for show.
The United States is trying to say, well, we’re only there to give help to an ally. The whole world has noticed that the U.S. now has two aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, right off the Near Eastern shore, and it has an atomic submarine near the Persian Gulf.
Why are they there? President Biden and Congress say we are not going to have American troops fighting Hamas in Gaza. We’re not going to get involved. Well, if the troops are not going to get involved, why are they there?
Well, we know what the American planes are doing. Yesterday, they bombed yet another airport and a fuel depot in Syria. They’re bombing Syria. And it’s very clear that they’re there not to protect Israel, but to fight Iran.
Again and again, every American newspaper, when it talks about Hamas, it says Hamas is acting on behalf of Iran. When it talks about Hezbollah, and is there going to be an intervention from Lebanon against northern Israel, they say Hezbollah are the Iranian puppets.
Any time they talk about any Near Eastern leader, it’s really that all these leaders are puppets of Iran, just like in Ukraine and Central Europe, they talk about Hungary and other countries as all being puppets of Putin in Russia.
Their focus, really – America isn’t trying to fight to protect Ukraine. It’s fighting for the last Ukrainian to be exhausted in what they’d hoped would be depleting Russia’s military. Well, it hasn’t worked.
Well, the same thing in Israel. If the United States is pushing Israel and Netanyahu to escalate, escalate, escalate, to do something that at a point is going to lead Nasrallah to finally say, okay, we can’t take it anymore. We’re coming in and helping rescue the Gazians and especially rescue the West Bank, where just as much fighting is taking place. We’re going to come in.
And that’s when the United States will then feel free to move not only against Lebanon, but all the way via Syria, Iraq, to Iran.
What we’re seeing in Gaza and the West Bank today is only the catalyst, the trigger for the fact that the neocons say we are never going to have a better chance than we have right now to conquer Iran.
So this is the point for the showdown, that if America is to control Near Eastern oil, and by controlling Near Eastern oil, by bringing it under the US control, it can control the energy imports of much of the world.
And therefore, this gives American diplomats the power to cut off oil and gas and to sanction any country that tries to go multipolar, any country that tries to resist US unipolar control.
BEN NORTON: Yeah, Michael, I think you’re really hitting such an important point, which is how this is one of the most geostrategic regions of the world, especially when it comes to hydrocarbons.
The entire global economy is still very heavily reliant on oil and gas, and especially considering the US is not part of OPEC, and especially now considering that OPEC has really expanded essentially to OPEC+ and now includes Russia.
That means that Saudi Arabia and Russia essentially can help control global oil prices. And we’ve seen this really, in fact, in the United States in the past few years with the rise of consumer price inflation.
We saw that the Biden administration was concerned about gas prices, in particular in the lead up to the midterm elections. And the Biden administration has been releasing a lot of oil from the strategic oil reserves of the United States.
And we can also see these kinds of statements in particular when we go back and look at the Bush administration. There are numerous people involved in the Bush administration and the so-called “War on Terror” who openly talked about how important it was for Washington to dominate this region.
And I’m really thinking of, in 2007, when the top US general and NATO commander Wesley Clark famously disclosed that the Bush administration had made plans to overthrow seven countries in five years. And those were countries in North Africa and West Asia.
Specifically, he revealed in an interview with journalist Amy Goodman on Democracy Now that Washington’s plans were to overthrow the governments of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran:
WESLEY CLARK: About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me.
And one of the generals called me and he said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second”.
I said, “Well, you’re too busy”. He said, “No, no”. He says, “We’ve made the decision; we’re going to war with Iraq”.
This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq, why?” He said, “I don’t know”. He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do”.
So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no”. He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They’ve just made the decision to go to war with Iraq”.
He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments”.
And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail”.
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.
I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that”.
He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, “I just got this down from upstairs”, meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office today, and he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran”.
I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir”. I said, “Well, don’t show it to me”.
And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” And he said, “Sorry, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
AMY GOODMAN: I’m sorry, what did you say his name was? (laughs)
WESLEY CLARK: I’m not going to give you his name. (laughs)
AMY GOODMAN: So go through the countries again.
WESLEY CLARK: Well, starting with Iraq, then Syria and Lebanon, then Libya, then Somalia and Sudan, and then back to Iran.
BEN NORTON: And since then, we of course saw the U.S. war on Iraq. We of course saw the proxy war in Syria that still goes on in many ways. The U.S. is occupying one-third of Syrian territory, including the oil rich areas.
And Trump himself, President Donald Trump, boasted in a 2020 interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that he was leaving U.S. troops in Syria to take the oil:
DONALD TRUMP: And then they say, “He left troops in Syria”. You know what I did? I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil.
LAURA INGRAHAM: We’re not taking the oil. We’re not taking it.
DONALD TRUMP: Well, maybe we will, maybe we won’t.
LAURA INGRAHAM: They’re protecting the facilities.
DONALD TRUMP: I don’t know, maybe we should take it. But we have the oil. Right now, the United States has the oil.
So they say, “He left troops in Syria”. No, I got rid of all of them, other than we’re protecting the oil; we have the oil.
BEN NORTON: We also saw the U.S. impose sanctions on Lebanon, which contributed to hyperinflation and the destruction of the Lebanese economy. And that was largely because Hezbollah is part of the government, and the U.S. has been pressuring the Lebanese government to create a new government without Hezbollah.
We also saw, of course, that NATO destroyed the Libyan state in 2011. Somalia also has a failed state. And Sudan was divided in no small part thanks to the U.S. and Israel supporting South Sudan’s separatist movement on ethno-religious lines, using religious sectarianism.
So if you look at the list of countries that Wesley Clark named in 2006, the seven countries in five years, again, that was Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran; the only country that really has been able to maintain state stability, that has not been completely devastated by the United States, is Iran.
Of course, it took longer than five years, but the U.S. was pretty successful. And of course Israel has played an important role in this U.S. goal to destabilize those governments in the region.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, let’s look and see how this was done. Remember after America was attacked on 9/11, there was a meeting at the White House, and everybody knew that the pilots were Saudi Arabians, and they knew that some of the pilots had been staying at the Saudi embassy in Los Angeles, I think, in the United States.
But after 9/11, there was a cabinet meeting, and Rumsfeld said to the people there, look and find any link you can get to Iraq, forget Saudi Arabia, no problem, Iraq is the key. And he directed them to find it, and 9/11 became the excuse for attacking not Saudi Arabia, but Iraq, and going right on with it.
Well, you needed a similar crisis in Libya. They said in Libya, there was some, I think, fundamentalists in the suburbs of one of the [cities], not the capital city, that were causing problems. And so you have to “protect” the innocent people from [Muammar Gadhafi], and you go in and grab all of their gold reserves, all of their money, and you take over the oil on behalf of France’s oil monopoly.
Well, this is the role of the fighting in Gaza today. Netanyahu’s fight against Gaza is being used as the excuse for America moving its warships there, its submarines, and bombing, along with Israel, the Syrian airport so that the Syrians are not able to move weapons or any kind of military support either to Lebanon, to the west, or Iran, to the east.
So it’s obvious that all of what we’re seeing is somehow to soften up public opinion for the fact that, well, just like we had to invade Iraq because of 9/11, we have to now finally fight and take out the oil refineries of Iran and their scientific institutes and any laboratories where they may be doing atomic research.
And Iran realizes this. Last week, the Iranian press TV said that their defense minister says that if there’s any attack on Iran, whether by Israel or by anyone else, the U.S. and its foreign bases are going to be hit hard.
Iran, Russia, China have all looked at the Gaza situation not as if it’s an Israeli action, but as if it’s the U.S. action. They all see exactly that it’s all about Iran, and the American press only says when it talks about Gaza or Hamas or Hezbollah or any other group, it’s always the Iranian tool so-and-so.
They’re demonizing Iran in the same way that the neocons have demonized Russia to prepare for America declaring an undeclared war against Iran. And they may even declare war.
Last night, on [November] 8, the Republicans had their presidential debate without Trump, and Nikki Haley said, you know, we’ve got to fight Iran, we’ve got to conquer it. And DeSantis of Florida said, yes, kill them all. He didn’t say who the them was. Was it Hamas? Was it everybody who lives in Gaza? Was it all of the Arabs in the Middle East?
And we’re really seeing something very much like the Crusades here. It’s a real fight for who is going to control energy, because, again, the key, if you can control the world’s flow of energy, you can do to the whole world what the United States did to Germany last year by blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines.
You can grind its industry to a halt, its chemical industry, its steelmaking industry, any of its energy-intensive industries, if countries do not agree to U.S. unipolar control. That’s why it wants to control these areas.
Well, the wildcard here is Saudi Arabia. Well, in two days, I think you’re going to have the Iranian president visit Saudi Arabia, and we’re going to see what’s going to happen.
But Saudi Arabia finds that while its role is key, Saudi Arabia could simply say we’re not going to export more oil until America pulls out of the Near East. But then all of Saudi Arabia’s monetary savings are invested in the U.S.
The United States is holding the world hostage, not only by controlling its oil and gas and energy, but by controlling its finance. It’s like you have your money in a mafia bank or in Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency mutual fund. They can do whatever they want with it.
So I think what would happen is it’s very unlikely that Saudi Arabia is ostensibly going to visibly break with the United States because the U.S. would hold it hostage.
But I think what it would do would be what has been talked about ever since the 1960s, when similar problems came with Iran. And Iran’s ace in the hole has always been the ability to sink a ship in the Hormuz Strait, where the oil goes through a very narrow little strait, where if you sink a tanker there or a warship, it’s going to block all of the sea trade with Saudi Arabia.
And that would certainly, number one, take Saudi Arabia off the hook for saying, we can’t help it. Of course, we’d love to export oil, but we can’t because the shipping lanes are all blocked because you, America, attacked Iran and they defended themselves by sinking the ship. So you can’t send your aircraft carriers and submarines to attack Iran. That’s very understandable.
But the United States is causing a world crisis.
Well, obviously, the United States knows that that’s going to happen because it’s been discussed literally for 50 years. Since I was at the Hudson Institute working on national security, it was being discussed what to do when Iran sinks the ship in the Strait of Hormuz.
Well, the United States figures, okay, oil prices are going to go up. And if Iran fights back in this way, we then will have the power to do to the world what we did to Germany in 2022 when we cut off its oil. But in this case, we don’t take the blame.
We’ll say, oh, we didn’t block the Saudi and Arab oil trade. It was that Iran that blocked it, and that’s why we’re going to bomb Iran, assuming that they can.
So that, I think, is the contingency plan. And just as America had a contingency plan just like that, waiting for an opportunity, like 9-11, they needed a trigger, and Netanyahu has provided the trigger. And that’s why the United States has been backing Netanyahu.
And of course, Iran says, well, we have the ability to really wipe out Israel. And in Congress, General Miley and the others have all said, well, we know that Iran could wipe out Israel. That’s why we have to attack Iran.
But in attacking Iran, you send its missiles off to Israel, and again, Israel will end up being the Near Eastern equivalent of Ukraine. And that sort of is the plan, and I think a lot of Israelis see this, and they’re the ones who are worried and are opposing Netanyahu and trying to prevent him from triggering a whole set of military exchanges that Israel won’t be able to resist.
And even though Iran, I’m sure they can bomb some places in Iran, but now that you have Russia, China, all supporting Iran through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, you’re having the lines being drawn very, very clearly.
So it seems that this scenario is inevitable because Mearsheimer pointed out that it’s impossible to have a negotiated solution or settlement between Israel and Palestine. He said you can’t have a two-state solution because the Palestinian state is going to be like an Indian reservation in America, all sort of cut apart and isolated, not really a state.
And you can’t have a single state because a single state is a theocratic state. It’s like, again, it’s like the United States in the Wild West in the 19th century.
And I think the way to put it in perspective is to realize that what we’re seeing today in the attempt to split the world is very much like, excuse me, very much like what happened in the 12th and 13th century with the Crusades.
BEN NORTON: Yeah, Michael, you raise a lot of very important points there. And I know you want to talk further about the Crusades and the historical analogy. And I think you made a really good point about the US empire standing in as the new Crusaders.
But before you move away from the more contemporary political discussion, I wanted to highlight two very important points that you stressed.
One is not only the hydrocarbon reserves in the Middle East, which are so important for the world economy and in the US attempt to maintain control over oil and gas supplies and in particular energy costs.
There’s also an election coming up in 2024, and the US is concerned about gas prices and inflation. And of course, energy inputs are a key factor in inflation.
But furthermore, this region is strategic because of trade routes. Of course, the Suez Canal, according to looking at data here from the World Economic Forum, 30% of the world’s shipping container volume transits through the Suez Canal and 12% of all global trade consists of goods that pass through the Suez Canal.
And we saw this in 2021 when there was this big media scandal when a US ship got stuck in the Suez Canal. And this, of course, also came at the time when the world was coming out of the pandemic and there were all these supply chain shocks.
So we can see how sensitive the global economy is to even small issues in the global supply chain. And when you talk about shipping routes, we’re not only talking about the Suez Canal, we’re also talking about in the Red Sea toward the south.
You also have the Bab al-Mandab. This is a very important strait off of the coast of Yemen. And in the war in Yemen, starting in 2014 and 2015, a lot of the fighting back by the U.S. in this war was in the south, off of the Bab al-Mandab, because this is such an important strait where every single day millions of barrels of oil flow through this strait.
And this also reminded me, Michael, you were talking about the historical context. And if you go back to 1956, Israel invaded Egypt. And why was that? Israel invaded Egypt because Egypt’s leftist president, Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal.
And at that moment, what was very interesting is that the U.K. and France were strongly supporting Israel in this war against Egypt because they were concerned also about Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez. At that moment, the U.S. wasn’t as deeply pro-Israel as it later became.
Of course, in 1967, in the Six-Day War, Israel attacked the neighboring Arab states and occupied part of Egypt, the Sinai, and then also what became Gaza. Israel occupied the Golan Heights of Syria, which remain illegally occupied Syrian territory today. And Israel occupied the West Bank, what we call the West Bank today.
But another important detail about that is, after the 1967 war, Israel increasingly became much more of a U.S. ally.
Whereas the first generation of Israeli leaders were much more, many of them were European, whereas the later generations of Israelis have been really American.
I mean, someone like Netanyahu, he is an American. Netanyahu was raised in the United States. He went to high school in Philadelphia. He went to high school with Reggie Jackson, by the way. He spent his most formative years in the U.S. He went to college at MIT.
He then worked in Boston, and he worked with many Republicans that he became friends with, like Mitt Romney, like Donald Trump. And then when he went back to Israel, he was sent to the U.S. to be a diplomat in the United States.
So the new generation of Israeli leaders is much more American, essentially.
And another detail you mentioned about Iran is so important, because, up until the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Iran of the Shah, the U.S.-backed monarchy, was such an important ally in the region.
And in fact, Saudi Arabia and Iran were famously referred to as the twin pillars. Saudi Arabia was the west pillar and Iran was the east pillar. The U.S. used to try to dominate this region, of course, with the support of Israel as well.
Well, with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the U.S. lost that crucial east pillar, which meant that Israel became even more important from the perspective of the U.S. imperialism to maintain control over this region.
So I just wanted to mention those details of the strategic importance of the trade routes, like the Bab al-Mandab Strait, like the Suez Canal, and also the fact that the Iranian Revolution fundamentally shifted U.S. policy in the region and made Israel even more important from the perspective of U.S. imperialism.
And now we’re in a moment where, as you mentioned, the U.S. is even losing control over Saudi Arabia. So it’s losing both of its pillars, which is, again, why Washington is so desperate in propping up Israel, despite the fact that the entire region is completely against these settler-colonialist policies and these ethnic cleansing policies that Israel is carrying out right now, as the entire world is watching.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, to U.S. diplomats, what you call the support of Israel is really the support of the U.S.’ ability to militarily control the rest of the Near East.
It’s all about oil. America is not giving all this money to Israel because it loves Israel, but because Israel is the military base from which the United States can attack Syria, Iraq, and Iran and Lebanon. So it’s a military base.
And of course, it can frame this in terms of pro-Israeli, pro-Jewish policy, but this is only for the public relations view of the State Department.
If American strategy is based on energy in the Near East, then Israel is only a means to this end. It’s not the end itself. And that’s why the United States needed to have an aggressive Israeli government.
You can look at Netanyahu as being, in a way, a U.S. puppet, very much like Zelensky. Their positions are identical in their reliance on the United States against the majority of their own people.
So you keep talking about America’s support of Israel. It’s not supporting Israel at all. It rejects the majority of Israelis. It supports the Israeli military, not the Israeli society or the culture, have nothing to do with Judaism at all. This is pure military politics, and that’s how I’ve always heard it discussed among the military and national security people.
So you want to be careful not to be taken in by the cover story.
There’s one other means of control, I think, that we should mention, and that is, you’ve had in the last month or so all sorts of statements by the United States that as soon as Russia conquers the Ukraine and solidifies its control, it’s going to bring up claims against war crimes, crimes against humanity, against Russia.
America is trying to use the crooked court system. The International Criminal Court is a branch of the Pentagon in the State Department, and it’s the kangaroo court. The idea is that somehow the kangaroo court can give America judgments against Putin as they’ve declared him to be arrested anywhere he goes of people who respect the kangaroo court, and they can have all sorts of sanctions against Russian property elsewhere.
Well, look at how on earth are they going to justify these claims of war crimes against Russia if in the view of what’s happening between Israel and Gaza right now, and in fact, the arms and the bombs that are being used against Gaza are U.S. bombs, U.S. arms. The U.S. is fueling it all.
How on earth can the United States not accuse itself of war crimes on the basis of what it’s trying to accuse Russia of? Part of the splitting of the world that you’re going to see, whether or not the United States can actually bomb Iran, is going to be a whole setup of parallel courts and an isolation, not only of the United States, but as Europe is coming in.
Basically, there’s a fight for who is going to control the world right now, and that’s why I mentioned the Crusades.
I want to say I’ve been writing a history of the evolution of financial policy. I’ve done two volumes already, one on the Bronze Age Near East, …and forgive them their debts, and the other on classical antiquity, The Collapse of Antiquity. I’m now working on the third volume, which covers the Crusades to World War I.
It’s really all about an attempt by Rome, that had hardly any economic power at all, to take over all of the five Christian bishoprics that were made. Constantinople was really the new Rome. That was the head of Orthodox Christianity.
The emperor of Constantinople was really the emperor over the whole Christian world. It was followed by Antioch, Alexandria, and finally Jerusalem.
The Crusades really began, before they attacked the Near East it began in the 11th century. And Rome was finally being attacked by the Norman armies that were coming in and grabbing parts of France and had moved into Italy.
So the papacy made a deal with the Norman warlords, and it said, “We will give you the divine right to rule, we will recognize you as the Christian king, and we will excommunicate all of your enemies, but you have to pledge feudal fealty, loyalty to us, and you have to let us appoint your bishops and control the churches, which control most of your land, and you have to pay us tribute”.
The papacy all during the 10th century was controlled by a small group of aristocratic families around Rome that treated the papacy just as they treat the local political mayor of a city or the local administrators.
The church was just sort of run by a family. It had nothing to do with Christian religion at all. It was just, this is the church property, and one of our relatives, we’re always going to have as the pope.
Well, the popes didn’t have any troops in the late 11th century, and so they got the troops by making a deal with the Normans, and they decided, okay, we’re going to have an ideal, we’re going to mount the Crusades, and we’re going to rescue Jerusalem from the “infidels”, the Muslims.
Well, the problem is that Jerusalem didn’t need a rescue, because all throughout the medieval world, throughout Islam, no matter what the religion of the governing classes was, there was a religious tolerance, and that continued for hundreds of years under the Ottoman Empire.
There was only one group that was intolerant, and that was the Romans, that said, “We have to control all of Christianity, in order to prevent these aristocratic Italian families from taking over again”.
And so they mounted the Crusades, nominally against Jerusalem, but they ended up sacking Constantinople, and two centuries later, by 1291, the Christians lost in Acre.
The whole Crusade against the Near East failed.
I think you can see the parallel that I’m going to be drawing.
So most of the Crusades were not fought against Islam, because Islam was too strong.
The Crusades were fought against other Christians. And the fight of Roman Christianity was against the original Christianity for itself, as it existed over the last 10 centuries.
Well, you’re having something like that today. Just as Rome appointed the Normans as feudal rulers, William the Conqueror in Sicily, the U.S. appoints Zelensky, supports Netanyahu, supports client oligarchs in Russia, supports Latin American dictators.
So you have a U.S. view of the world that is not only unipolar, but in order to have unipolar U.S. control of the world, the U.S. has to be in charge of treating any foreign state, any foreign president as a feudal serf, basically, that they owe feudal loyalty to the United States’ sponsors.
And just as you had the Inquisition formed in the 12th century, really, to enforce this obedience to Rome as opposed to independent southern France, and independent Italy, and Arab science in Spain, you have today the U.S. using the National Endowment for Democracy, and all of the organizations controlled by Victoria Nuland with her cookies, to support things.
Well, you’re having the whole strategy of the Roman takeover, how it was going to take over other countries, how it was going to prevent other countries from becoming independent of Rome, is almost sentence for sentence what you get in American national security reports, how to control other countries. And that’s really the fight that we’re seeing there.
And against that, you’re finding the fight of other countries, the global majority. But in this case, whereas Constantinople was looted in 1204 and sort of destroyed by the Fourth Crusade, Russia, and China, and Iran and the other countries have not been looted.
The only thing that the United States can do right now is it’s setting up this military plan to attack Iran. What is the role going to be of, for instance, India? The attack on Iran and on oil is at the same time an attack on the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative, the whole attempt to control transportation, not only oil, but transportation by the global majority for each other’s mutual growth, mutual gain, mutual trade.
And the United States is trying to have an alternative plan for all of this that would run from India, essentially largely through Israel, and making a cut right across Gaza, which is one of the big problems that are being discussed now, to the Israeli control of Gaza, which would control its offshore oil and gas.
So you’re having the wild cards in the U.S. plan, India, Saudi Arabia, what will it do, and Turkey, because Turkey also has an interest in this oil and gas. And if the Islamic countries decide that they’re really under attack, and this attack by the Christian West against Islam is really a fight to the death, then Turkey will join with Saudi Arabia and with all of the other countries, the Shiites, and the Sunnis, and the Alawites will join together and say, what we have in common is the Islamic religion.
That is really going to be essentially the extension of America’s fight against China and Russia.
So what we’re seeing, I’m going to try to summarize now, what we’re really seeing is having fought Russia to the last Ukrainian, and threatening to fight Iran to the last Israeli. The United States is trying to send arms to Taiwan to say, wouldn’t you like to fight to the last Taiwanese against China? And that’s really the U.S. strategy all over the world.
It’s trying to fuel other countries to fight wars for its own control. That’s how Rome used the Norman armies to conquer southern Italy, England, and Yugoslavia.
Israel, and what is in the news over the whole attacks in Gaza, is only the opening stage, the trigger for this war, just as the shooting in Sarajevo started World War I in Serbia started everything.
BEN NORTON: Well, you raised so many interesting points, Michael, and I think your analysis is very fresh and unique and very insightful. I wish we had more time to go into some of these topics, but we’ve already been speaking for about an hour.
So I think we’re going to wrap up here. But I do want to thank you, Michael, for joining us. And of course, we’ll be back very soon for more analysis.
For people who are interested, I actually have interviewed Michael. I did an interview recently on classical antiquity, and Rome and Greece. And he has also written about the history of debt up through the creation of Christianity in his book And Forgive Them Their Debts. And now he is working on this political, economic, materialist history of the Crusades.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I didn’t realize when I began the book in the 1980s, drafting it, I didn’t realize how critical the Roman papacy was, and how similar it was to the State Department, and CIA, and the blob today in its plans for world conquest.
BEN NORTON: Well, I’m sure in the future we will have many opportunities to discuss that research. Of course, for people who want to get more of Michael’s very important analysis, you should check out the show that he co-hosts here with friend of the show, Radhika Desai, and that is Geopolitical Economy Hour.
If you go to our website, geopoliticaleconomy.com, or if you go to our YouTube channel, you can find a playlist with all of the different episodes of Geopolitical Economy Hour. So thanks again, Michael, and we’ll definitely have you back very soon.
MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s good to be here. Thank you.


Instruction: Write an article about: Chinese balloon was not spying, US gov’t admits months after manufactured crisis. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: balloons, China, Jens Stoltenberg, Mike Gallagher, NATO, Pentagon

Output:
The Pentagon admitted that a Chinese balloon that crossed into US territory in February was not spying; it was likely blown off course by wind. But Washington and the media milked this manufactured scandal for new cold war propaganda.

The US government has admitted that severe accusations it made against China were just a lot of hot air.
The highest-ranking official in the US military has clarified that a Chinese balloon that crossed into US territory in February 2023 was not spying; it was likely blown off course by wind.
CBS News published an interview this September with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who stated, “The intelligence community, their assessment – and it’s a high-confidence assessment – [is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon”.
Milley conceded that the large rubber object was probably pushed off track by powerful wind.

This report, released seven months after the incident, has confirmed exactly what the Chinese government stated at the time: its balloon was not spying on the United States, and only accidentally entered its airspace.
The US government has still insisted that the Chinese balloon had technology that could have potentially been used to gather information – although it has not clarified if that technology was focused specifically on collecting data on weather patterns, which is what Beijing said it was doing.
Regardless, in another massive blow to Washington’s narrative, CBS News acknowledged in its report that, “After the Navy raised the wreckage from the bottom of the Atlantic, technical experts discovered the balloon’s sensors had never been activated while over the Continental United States“.
So even if the Chinese balloon had the technological capacity to spy on the United States, as Washington claims, the sensor was never turned on.

This is not the first time a senior US official has admitted that the Chinese balloon was not spying.
In June, Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder made very similar comments.
“We’re aware that [the balloon] had intelligence collection capabilities, but it was our — and it has been our — assessment now that it did not collect while it was transiting the United States”, the Defense Department spokesman said, in remarks quoted by ABC News.
These statements confirm that Geopolitical Economy Report was accurate in its analysis in February, which synthesized existing evidence at the time and concluded that the Chinese balloon had likely been blown off course by unexpected weather.
US admits weather pushed Chinese balloon off course, US shot down hobbyists’ $12 balloon in $2M missile attack

Despite these bombshells proving the entire scandal to be manufactured, Washington and the US media turned this weather accident into a diplomatic crisis, milking the incident to demonize China and depict it as a grave “threat”.
The nationwide freakout was reminiscent of crude propaganda from the first cold war, when the US government produced “Duck and Cover” films instructing students to hide under their desks in the case of a sudden Soviet nuclear strike, or when Hollywood churned out blockbuster movies imploring North Americans to suspect their neighbors of being dastardly Russian communist spies.
Today, the United States is waging a new, second cold war. Moscow is still a target, but this time Washington’s main adversary is Beijing.
As CNN put it bluntly in February, “the Chinese balloon crisis could be a defining moment in the new Cold War”.
During the manufactured scandal, the US State Department claimed the “high altitude balloon’s equipment was clearly for intelligence surveillance”, and was “capable of conducting signals intelligence collection operations”.
The Pentagon referred to the rubber object as a “maneuverable Chinese surveillance balloon” that “violated U.S. airspace and international law, which is unacceptable”.
The White House accused Beijing of operating a “global” espionage program, stating, “We know that these [Chinese] surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners”.
Hawkish US politicians, like Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher, the chair of the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, declared that the large rubber object “is a threat right here at home. It is a threat to American sovereignty, and it is a threat to the Midwest”.
Fox News brought on air neoconservative activists from think tanks funded by the weapons industry, who argued that Beijing was using the balloon to spy on the US to “prepare the battlefield” for war.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg even claimed the rubber object was a threat to other Western governments.
While standing next to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Stoltenberg insisted, “The balloon over the United States confirms a pattern of Chinese behavior where we see that China has invested heavily in new capabilities, including different types of surveillance and intelligence platforms… We need to be aware of the constant risk of Chinese intelligence and step up what we do to protect ourselves and react in a prudent and responsible way”.


Instruction: Write an article about: Debt ceiling hypocrisy: US boosts military budget while restricting food stamps for poor. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Argentina, Dick Cheney, dollar, food stamps, imperialism, Japan, Joe Biden, Kevin McCarthy, military, neoliberalism, SNAP, welfare

Output:
US politicians from both parties agree: the deficit doesn’t matter. In their bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling, Biden and Republicans are boosting military spending to $886 billion while making it harder for poor people to receive food stamps and welfare.

The US government reached its debt limit of $31.4 trillion in early 2023. This unleashed a deluge of debate as to whether or not the Treasury was going to default, and how a deeply divided Congress could come to an agreement to raise the debt ceiling.
The constant chatter in the mainstream corporate media overlooked the real controversy, however. The reality is that practically no one in Washington truly cares about the US national debt.
In fact, in a bipartisan deal negotiated in late May to raise the debt ceiling, Democratic President Joe Biden and Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy agreed not to cut but rather to increase the already massive military budget from roughly $800 billion to $886 billion.
At the same time, the Biden-McCarthy deal makes it more difficult for poor people in the United States to get access to food stamps and welfare.

The US debt ceiling is a manufactured problem. It is a political football that is used every few years to justify cutting government funding for the very few social programs that do exist.
US public debt is denominated in dollars. It is money that the government could print and pay off.
Doing so would certainly fuel inflation. (And given the status of the dollar as the global reserve currency, that inflation would be exported to other countries as well.) But the US government has a precedent for doing so.
The US central bank, the Federal Reserve, effectively printed $8 trillion from 2008 until 2022, over 14 years of quantitative easing, to inflate an enormous asset bubble that made the rich even richer.

Unlike the United States, however, many foreign countries, especially those in the Global South, cannot simply print money to pay off their debts. Their monetary sovereignty is heavily restricted.
The government debt of many Global South nations is denominated in foreign currencies, primarily the US dollar. Yet they can’t print US dollars; only Washington can do so.
This has left countries like Argentina trapped in odious debt, denominated largely in US dollars, that is essentially unpayable, fueling an inflation crisis – and giving rise to fascistic, far-right demagogues.
Many countries hold national debt denominated in dollars because the greenback is the global reserve currency.
So the United States can maintain a gargantuan trade deficit with the world, sucking in the surplus produced by foreign workers, racking up trillions in debt, but its money doesn’t significantly devalue because there is so much international demand for it. And wealthy elites across the planet hold much of their wealth in dollar-denominated assets – like the Treasury securities that make up the national debt.
This is the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar.
It is clear that virtually no one in Washington actually believes that the debt ceiling is important, because the vast majority of the members of both hegemonic political parties happily vote every year to keep increasing the military budget – which is on the path to reach $1 trillion by 2030.
Back in the 2000s, when Republican George W. Bush was president, his neoconservative Vice President Dick Cheney boasted that “deficits don’t matter”.
Cheney approvingly cited the previous Republican president from the 1980s, lecturing Bush’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill: “You know, Paul, [Ronald] Reagan proved deficits don’t matter“.
The Bush administration further proved this by spending trillions of dollars to wage the so-called “war on terror”. Washington invaded Afghanistan, then invaded Iraq, while expanding the US military’s footprint all around the world.
Where did the trillions of dollars needed to wage those wars come from? The government just spent it. It didn’t care about the debt ceiling, because Washington can create dollars – something no other country in the world can do.
The deal between President Biden and House Speaker McCarthy reflects the same logic shared by Cheney.
Debt ceiling bill reflects the bipartisan consensus in Washington: cut social spending to further enrich military contractors pic.twitter.com/l1RSjXBxDf
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) June 1, 2023

While Republicans on the floor of the Congress demanded that Washington impose austerity measures, they eagerly joined Democrats in increasing the military budget from around $800 billion in 2023 to $886 billion in 2024.
(Many major media outlets reported that the agreement boosted US military spending to $885 billion, but the precise number is $886.3 billion.)
Bloomberg reported clearly on this hypocrisy:
Republican lawmakers who oppose the debt-ceiling bill argue it doesn’t do enough to cut spending or reduce the deficit. Yet when defense is concerned, many argue the government ought to be spending more, not less.
Under the deal passed by the House on Wednesday evening [May 31] and sent to the Senate, defense spending would get the 3.3% increase the president proposed for the coming year — even as other programs are cut.
…
The administration’s $886.3 billion national security budget request for fiscal 2024 provides the biggest-ever defense spending increase and also one of the largest peacetime budgets when adjusted for inflation.
The US would be spending more on defense than the next 10 nations combined.
However, even these staggering official figures are an underestimate.

The Congressional Budget Office divides US discretionary spending between “defense” and “nondefense”.
In 2023, “defense” expenditure was reported as roughly $800 billion, with “nondefense” as $936 billion. But those figures are misleading, because the so-called nondefense spending included $131 billion of benefits for military veterans.
So if you subtract veterans’ benefits from nondefense and add it to defense, military expenditure was at least $931 billion, or 54.5% of 2023 discretionary spending.
This is just the official discretionary spending on paper. In reality, the US military frequently spends much more. The Pentagon has failed every single audit it has ever tried, and there are tens of trillions of dollars of spending that is completely unaccounted for.
The point is that the approximately $800 billion military budget in 2023 was already an underestimate, which suggests that the new $886.3 billion that Biden and McCarthy agreed on for 2024 is likely a lowball as well.
Meanwhile, US military spending is off the charts, when compared to other countries.

In 2022, US military expenditure made up 39% of global spending. Washington spent 10 times more on its military than Russia, and three times more than China (despite the fact that China has four times the US population).
US military spending in 2022 was actually estimated at $877 billion (significantly higher than the official discretionary budget). That was larger than the next 10 biggest military spenders combined.
So Washington spent more on its military than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine, all together. And many of those countries are US allies.
US military spending was higher than the next 10 countries combined in 2022. Five years ago, it was higher than only the next nine. How much safer do y’all feelhttps://t.co/VIq8pwChRI pic.twitter.com/FX47O8Uego
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) April 29, 2023

In short, this bipartisan agreement in which the Democratic president and the Republican speaker of the House agreed to increase military spending to (a minimum of) $886 billion makes it very clear that both corporate parties in the United States recognize that the national debt is not a real problem. They agree with Dick Cheney: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”.
While increasing the military budget, the Biden-McCarthy deal simultaneously makes it more difficult for poor people in the United States to receive food stamps and welfare.
The agreement states that people aged 54 and under have to work at least 80 hours a month in order to receive food stamps.
This deal could potentially push hundreds of thousands of people in the United States off of receiving food stamps and welfare.
This is despite the fact that these social support programs have already been significantly slashed.
Former President Bill Clinton campaigned on the promise that he would “end welfare as we know it”, and he basically did so.
Donald Trump also tried to significantly cut food stamps. (Although a court blocked his plan.)
Hunger is a serious problem in the United States. A 2020 report by the Brookings Institution found that more than 16% of households with children did not have enough food. That was one out of six children.
The food stamp program is officially known as SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
According to data from the Department of Agriculture, four-fifths (81%) of US households that receive SNAP have either a child, an elderly individual, or an individual with a disability.
In 2022, one-fifth of children in the US lived in families that received food stamps.
As of February 2023, 42.5 million people in the US received food stamps. That is 13% of the US population: more than one out of every 10 people.
This is a vitally important social program, because poverty remains a very significant problem in the United States. This is painfully visible with the growing homelessness in major cities.
Meanwhile, inequality is increasing; billionaires and millionaires keep getting wealthier; the rich get richer and the poor are getting poorer.
As president, Donald Trump oversaw $1.5 trillion in tax cuts. A 2019 study found that these resulted in billionaires paying a lower tax rate than the bottom half of US households.
“In 2018 the richest 400 families in the US paid an average effective tax rate of 23% while the bottom half of American households paid a rate of 24.2%”, The Guardian reported.
The newspaper added, “Taxes on the rich have been falling for decades. In 1960 the 400 richest families paid as much as 56% in taxes, by 1980 the rate had fallen to 40%”.
When he ran for office in 2016, Trump had outlandishly claimed he would pay off the US national debt within eight years.
Instead, the national debt rose by nearly $7.8 trillion during Trump’s four years in office.
“The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration”, ProPublica reported.

It is very easy to explain why there is such a massive national debt in the United States: The rich pay fewer and fewer taxes (while the tax burden actually is increasing on poor and working people); and the US government has spent trillions of dollars waging wars around the world, maintaining 800 foreign military bases and launching 251 foreign military interventions just since 1991, according to data from the Congressional Research Service.
Moreover, for more than a decade, the US Federal Reserve ran what was effectively a free money program for the rich, printing some $8 trillion to pump up one of the largest asset bubbles in human history, inflating the prices of stocks, bonds, and real estate.
These assets are owned by rich people, not the poor. It was trillions of dollars going into the pockets of the richest people in the United States – and into those of elites in other parts of the world.
This was the most massive act of welfare in human history. Welfare for the rich.
Following the 2008 financial crash, in 14 years of quantitative easing, the Fed “printed” (digitally, at least) trillions of dollars to buy up treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, including toxic assets that practically no one wanted to invest in.
Who were the beneficiaries? The rich. Because in the United States, the wealthiest 10% of people own nearly 90% of stocks.
The insult to injury is that, while Washington was pouring money into this substantial welfare for the rich, it was cutting the paltry welfare for the poor.
The last detail that is ignored in mainstream media discussion of the US debt ceiling is the role of the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Many economists from the school of modern monetary theory (MMT) have noted that the debt ceiling is an arbitrary, manufactured scandal, because it is debt that the US government owes in dollars.
If the government wanted, it could simply print that money to pay off the debt. It would create inflation, but it would be possible.
But few MMT proponents acknowledge the fact that this is only really possible in the United States because of its unique status as the issuer of the global reserve currency, and its role at the center of the imperialist world system.
One of the very few economists who has explained this is Michael Hudson. His book Super Imperialism shows how the international financial system was essentially designed to give the United States a free lunch.
Most governments around the world, especially in the Global South, cannot simply print money in order to pay off their debt, because much of it is denominated in a foreign currency, commonly dollars.
For many countries in the Global South, when the government needs finance, it will sell eurobonds – government debt denominated in a foreign currency. (Despite the name, a eurobond has nothing to do with the euro.)
When these Global South nations – like, say, Ghana, Zambia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or Argentina – sell eurobonds denominated in US dollars, their economies have to actually produce value in order to get access to those dollars to pay off their debt.
When they import crucial commodities like oil and gas, capital goods like machine parts and vehicles, or other technologies, they need dollars to pay for them (lest they risk a local currency devaluation).
The US economy does not have to produce anything of value. Washington can simply print the dollars needed to pay off its debts or import foreign goods and services.
This is precisely how the United States has maintained the world’s largest current account deficit for decades.
This means that the US government consistently imports way more than it exports, and at a level that no other country on Earth can come close to.
Countries by their current account balance, averaged from years 1980 to 2008 (red is a deficit, green is a surplus)
In addition to its massive trade deficit with the rest of the world, there is a massive inflow of investments into securities in the United States, leading to a capital account surplus. (The inverse of the current account is the capital account.)
Argentina also frequently has a current account deficit. It largely exports cheap, low value-added agricultural goods, while importing energy, high value-added capital goods, and technologies.
This has led to a severe devaluation of Argentina’s currency, the peso. Triple-digit inflation is eroding away the life savings and living standards of Argentine workers.
The US current account deficit is much larger than Argentina’s, but Washington’s debt is denominated in dollars, which it can print; Buenos Aires’ debt is also mostly denominated in dollars, which it cannot print.
Argentina is unable to pay the massive debt it owes in dollars, largely to Western vulture funds like BlackRock and to the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF), and its central bank is thus constantly bleeding foreign exchange reserves in an attempt to service debt payments, pushing the peso into freefall.
That is a fundamental difference between the US and Argentina.
When most countries have a consistent current account deficit, their national currencies are devalued. They have to sell their currency in foreign exchange markets in order to get access to the foreign currencies they use to buy the excess imports.
Because of the hegemony of the US dollar, because of the design of the US-centered imperialist world system, that means they usually have to get access to dollars.
So the Argentine peso has significantly weakened in relation to the US dollar.
When countries with chronic current account deficits see their currencies devalued, it decreases the living standards and purchasing power of workers, often making it prohibitively expensive to buy imported products like phones or computers.
But what this also does, simultaneously, is make exports in those countries more competitive, because it is now cheaper for those goods to be bought by foreign clients.
Theoretically, at least on paper, this process could thus lead the deficit country to move toward a more balanced current account over time, with a better balance of payments with other countries.
However, in the United States, the dollar does not significantly devalue, despite the massive current account deficit, because of its status as the global reserve currency: Washington’s exorbitant privilege.
Outside of Argentina, very few people want pesos. Unless you’re buying goods or services from Argentina, the currency is not useful. And even much of the invoicing for Argentina’s international trade is done in dollars. (Although that is changing as Buenos Aires and Beijing seek to de-dollarize their commercial exchange.)
Very few people outside of Argentina are investing in Argentine assets denominated in the peso. They’re using US dollars.
However, because of the exorbitant privilege of the dollar, the US can keep importing, and importing, and importing, absorbing the surplus of the world, sucking in the drain of the surplus value produced by foreign workers.
As for the massive flow of dollars out into the rest of the world, they are frequently invested in assets in the United States, like securities on Wall Street, or in real estate, or Treasury bonds – that is to say, the national debt!
This is the “exorbitant privilege” that France’s Finance Minister and future President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously complained about in the 1960s.
The US economy doesn’t need to produce $100 worth of value, through the labor of its workers, in order to buy $100 worth of products. The US government can print that money. (And it is basically free, because most of that “printing” is digital; it’s not even physical cash; it’s numbers on a computer screen on the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury.)
So if the US needs to rectify its balance of payments and fund imports, the Treasury can sell bonds denominated in its own currency.
On the other hand, workers in other countries, especially those in the Global South, have to produce constant surplus; they have to break their backs working in order to produce $100 worth of value to get 100 dollars.
A sizeable part of those 100 dollars then often flow immediately back out of the country to pay interest on the debt owed to vulture funds on Wall Street, to asset management firms like BlackRock, which are investing the capital of rich oligarchs and gobbling up assets around the world.
So yes, the MMT theorists are correct; the US government can print dollar to pay off its national debt.
Some creative economists have proposed that the Treasury could even mint a $1 trillion platinum coin, so Congress won’t have to raise the debt ceiling in the future. That is technically possible.
However, most governments around the world cannot do this.
As for the small handful of other countries that, like the United States, have relatively stable economies but large national debts, what makes them different is they mostly have current account surpluses.
Japan, for instance, has a gargantuan national debt of over 260% of GDP (roughly double the US debt-to-GDP ratio of 130%).

However, unlike the US, Japan has a chronic current account surplus. It is a manufacturing powerhouse.
Moreover, like the US, Japan’s debt is largely denominated in its own currency, the yen, which Tokyo can print.
In fact, Japan’s central bank owned a staggering 52% of government bonds as of the end of 2022. This is national debt owed by one part of the government to another part of the government.
Even further, more than 90% of Japan’s debt was held domestically, with just 8% owed to foreigners, as of the end of 2021.

Japan is also a key part of the US-led imperialist system. This is what gives Japan the economic and political ability to maintain this debt relationship and to denominate its bonds in yen, in a way that many countries cannot do.
This is particularly true for countries in the Global South that are targeted by the United States for regime change, war, sanctions, and economic blockades.
These nations are heavily restricted in their options for getting access to finance, which is needed to build infrastructure and develop the economy.
Very few investors are going to buy the debt of a country under US sanctions, of a nation facing the prospects of external destabilization and war – which would mean they probably wouldn’t get paid back for their investment.
The point of all of this is that the relative “unimportance” of the US national debt, as acknowledged by Dick Cheney and many MMT theorists alike, is largely a product of its position at the center of the imperialist world-system of global accumulation.
If you are a poor country in the Global South, yes, you can print more and more of your currency to pay for social programs, but if that is not matched by corresponding economic activity and growth, if there is not a demand for your currency for importing the products that your economy produces, and especially if your country is dependent on importing commodities and capital goods, it is likely going to lead to significant inflation, which could devastate your economy.
The final factor to emphasize is the sheer, blunt force of the US military, with its nearly trillion-dollar annual budget and 800 foreign bases.
If Washington simply decided to default one day, and refused to pay its foreign debts, no foreign power could invade the US and force it to do so. The same cannot be said for most other countries, especially small ones with few resources in the periphery of the imperialist world system.


Instruction: Write an article about: Peru coup: CIA agent turned US ambassador met with defense minister day before president overthrown. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: CIA, coup, Lisa Kenna, Mike Pompeo, Pedro Castillo, Peru

Output:
The US ambassador in Peru, Lisa Kenna, worked for the CIA for 9 years, as well as the Pentagon. One day before the coup against elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo, Kenna met with Peru’s defense minister, who then ordered the military to turn against Castillo.

(Se puede leer este informe en español aquí.)
The US ambassador in Peru, a veteran CIA agent named Lisa Kenna, met with the country’s defense minister just one day before democratically elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo was overthrown in a coup d’etat and imprisoned without trial.
Peru’s defense minister, a retired brigadier general, ordered the military to turn against Castillo.

The coup set off mass protests all across Peru. The unelected regime has unleashed brutal violence, and police have killed numerous demonstrators.
Meanwhile, the US government has staunchly supported Peru’s unelected coup regime, which declared a nation-wide “state of emergency” and deployed the military to the streets in an attempt to crush the protests.
Esto no es la Guerra de las Galaxias es Chorrillos, Lima pic.twitter.com/KFluRVJFAu
— HezSocial (@ZLaicos) December 15, 2022

Most governments in Latin America have criticized or even refused to recognize Peru’s unelected coup regime, including Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, and various Caribbean nations.
The CIA has organized many coups against democratically elected left-wing leaders in Latin America, from Guatemala’s President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 to Chile’s President Salvador Allende in 1973.
When the Donald Trump administrated nominated Lisa Kenna to be ambassador to Peru in 2020, the State Department released a “certificate of competency” that revealed that, “Before joining the Foreign Service, she served for nine years as a Central Intelligence Agency officer.”
This important fact is curiously absent from most of Kenna’s bios, including her page on the US embassy’s official website.

Under Trump, Kenna also served as executive secretary of the State Department and was “senior aide” to Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who previously headed the CIA.
In regard to his work for the notorious spy agency, Pompeo admitted in 2019, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses.”
At a Congressional nomination hearing in 2020, Kenna admitted that, as executive secretary, she saw “nearly all” of the memos that were sent to Pompeo, adding, “I am aware of the vast majority of” calls made to and by him.
Kenna also previously worked for the Defense Department and served State Department roles in Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Swaziland, and Pakistan.
When President Joe Biden entered in January 2021, he kept Kenna as ambassador in Peru.
The current US Ambassador in Peru. pic.twitter.com/iUAbnR6Hzp
— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) December 13, 2022

On December 6, 2022, Kenna met with Gustavo Bobbio Rosas, a retired brigadier general from the Peruvian military who had officially been appointed as defense minister the day before. (A local media outlet reported that the meeting was on December 5, but that appears to have been an error.)
Peru’s Ministry of Defense published a photo of their friendly chat.
At the time of this meeting, it was known in Peru that the notoriously corrupt, oligarch-controlled congress was preparing for a new vote to overthrow democratically elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo.
Ahora ? | Ministro de Defensa, Gustavo Bobbio, se reúne con la embajadora de @USEMBASSYPERU, Lisa Kenna, para abordar temas de interés bilateral. ???? pic.twitter.com/9p7JuKNx75
— Mindef Perú (@MindefPeru) December 6, 2022

Article 113 of Peru’s constitution allows the unicameral congress to remove presidents simply by voting to declare that they have a “moral incapacity,” in a process known as “vacancy.”
Peru’s congress is well known for its extreme corruption. In the infamous “Mamanivideos” scandal, congress members from the far-right Fuerza Popular party were filmed bribing other congress members to vote against impeaching previous right-wing President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.
Fuerza Popular is run by the family members of Alberto Fujimori, the far-right dictator who ruled Peru with an iron fist from 1990 until 2000. With the support of the US government, Fujimori committed genocide, sterilizing approximately 300,000 Indigenous people, while killing, torturing, and disappearing large numbers of leftist dissidents.
The Mamanivideos scandal showed that it is quite easy for Peru’s rich oligarchs to buy votes in congress to overthrow democratically elected presidents.
And as soon as Castillo entered office on July 28, 2021, the congress tried to do exactly this.
Just one day after the US ambassador met with Peru’s defense minister, on December 7, 2022, the right-wing-dominated congress launched a parliamentary coup against Castillo, using article 113.
This was the third coup attempt in just over a year by Peru’s congress, which in September 2022 had a mere 7% approval rating.
Hoping to stop the coup, Castillo responded by trying to dissolve the congress. This is allowed in cases of obstructionism by article 134 of Peru’s constitution.
Defense Minister Bobbio immediately denounced the president’s actions. He published a video resigning from his position (that he had only held for three days).
Pronunciamiento| Presento mi renuncia de manera irrevocable a mi cargo de Ministro de Defensa. pic.twitter.com/efFC0cwZ34
— Gustavo Bobbio Rosas (@GustavoBobbio_) December 7, 2022

In the video, Bobbio told Peru’s armed forces not to support President Castillo and to oppose his attempt to dissolve the coup-plotting congress.
Bobbio claimed Castillo was launching a “coup attempt,” but in reality Bobbio was instructing the Peruvian military to support a coup against the democratically elected president, on behalf of a notoriously corrupt oligarch-controlled congress that had almost no support from the population.
While Bobbio ordered the military to rebel against the president, the US government promptly attacked Castillo.
Former CIA agent and current Ambassador Kenna tweeted, “The United States categorically rejects any extra-constitutional act by President Castillo to prevent the congress from fulfilling its mandate.”
Los Estados Unidos insta enfáticamente al presidente Castillo a revertir su intento de cerrar el Congreso y permitir que las instituciones democráticas de Perú funcionen según la Constitución. Alentamos al público peruano a mantener la calma durante este tiempo incierto.
— Lisa Kenna (@USAmbPeru) December 7, 2022

Kenna failed to mention article 134 of Peru’s constitution, which states:
The President of the Republic is authorized to dissolve the Congress if it has censured or denied its confidence to two Councils of Ministers [the official name of Peru’s cabinet]. The dissolution decree contains the call for elections for a new Congress.
When Castillo moved to dissolve the congress, he cited article 134 and he made it clear that it was only going to be a “temporary” closure. The president said new congressional elections would be held as soon as possible.
Kenna ignored all of this context. Instead, the ambassador declared, “The United States emphatically urges President Castillo to reverse his attempt to close the congress and allow the democratic institutions of Peru to function according to the constitution.”
By this, the CIA veteran meant that Castillo should simply allow the anti-democratic, oligarch-controlled congress to launch a coup against him.
The US embassy in Peru subsequently published an official statement echoing exactly what Kenna had said.
This was Washington’s green light for Peru’s corrupt, right-wing-dominated congress to overthrow President Castillo, and for the state security services to arrest him, without trial.
pic.twitter.com/cyDlKaxiC8
— Embajada EEUU Perú (@USEMBASSYPERU) December 7, 2022

Mere hours after Castillo was imprisoned, the oligarch-controlled congress appointed his vice president, Dina Boluarte, as leader of the country.
Boluarte promised on the floor of the congress that she would create “a political truce to install a government of national unity” – that is, a pact with the right wing.
Boluarte had been expelled in January 2022 from the leftist Perú Libre party that Castillo had campaigned with. She proudly declared that she “had never embraced the ideology” of the socialist political party.
The day after the coup, on December 8, the State Department gave its rubber stamp to Boluarte’s unelected regime.
“The United States welcomes President Boluarte and hopes to work with her administration to achieve a more democratic, prosperous, and secure region,” stated Brian A. Nichols, the US assistant secretary for western hemisphere affairs.
“We support her call for a government of national unity and we applaud Peruvians while they unite in their support of democracy,” the top State Department official added.
EE. UU. da la bienvenida a la presidenta Boluarte y espera trabajar con su administración para lograr una región más democrática, próspera y segura. Apoyamos su llamado a un gobierno de unidad nacional y aplaudimos a los peruanos mientras se unen en apoyo de su democracia. -BAN
— Brian A. Nichols (@WHAAsstSecty) December 8, 2022

In the mean time, the Peruvian people were filling the streets, condemning the coup against their elected president.
Peru’s police responded with violence, harshly cracking down, killing several protesters.
On December 14, the coup regime imposed a national “state of emergency” for 30 days, and said it might also declare a curfew.
At the same time, the coup regime also said it plans to sentence Castillo to 18 months in “preventative prison,” without a proper trial that resembles anything remotely like due process.
Just one day before the coup regime made these authoritarian announcements, former CIA agent and current US Ambassador met with Peru’s unelected leader, Dina Boluarte, and reiterated Washington’s wholehearted support.
La presidenta @DinaErcilia Boluarte recibió a la embajadora de @USEMBASSYPERU, Lisa Kenna, quien reiteró el pleno respaldo de su país a la institucionalidad democrática en el Perú y a las acciones del gobierno constitucional para estabilizar la situación social. ???? pic.twitter.com/30EqAa75lx
— Presidencia del Perú ?? (@presidenciaperu) December 13, 2022

Kenna praised the right-wing “unity government” that Boluarte pledged to form, adding, “We hope to strengthen our bilateral relationship.”
Me reuní con la presidenta Boluarte para reiterarle el compromiso de los EE.UU. con la defensa de la democracia y el respeto a las instituciones. Junto con la @presidenciaperu y el gobierno de unidad que se comprometió a formar, esperamos fortalecer nuestra relación bilateral.
— Lisa Kenna (@USAmbPeru) December 13, 2022

Brian Nichols, the top State Department official on Latin America, added with a touch of deep irony, “We support the Peruvian people and their constitutional democracy.” He urged protesters to “reject violence.”
On the same day, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, and Colombia released a joint diplomatic statement with a completely contrary message, supporting elected President Castillo, saying he was the victim of “anti-democratic harassment.”
Apoyamos al pueblo peruano y a su democracia constitucional. Alentamos a los Peruanos a juntarse pacificamente en apoyo a las reformas que Perú necesita y a rechazar la violencia. Trabajaremos con @presidenciaperu para avanzar estas metas. -BAN https://t.co/AnrrDnxUzi
— Brian A. Nichols (@WHAAsstSecty) December 13, 2022

In a press briefing on December 13, the State department was asked about the protests in Peru.
State Department spokesman Ned Price – who, like Lisa Kenna, was also a CIA agent – emphasized Washington’s steadfast support for Peru’s coup regime.
“We do commend Peruvian institutions and civil authorities for safeguarding democratic stability,” he said, as Peru’s repressive police killed protesters.
Just witnessed a protestor shot in head by police outside our hotel in #lima. Not sure he survived. Police response becoming more violent tonight  #DinaBoluarte #sosperu #PedroCastillo #ProtestasContraElCongreso #protestasenlima #Peru #ahora pic.twitter.com/8HJe3cTxvC
— M M (@MMinperu) December 13, 2022

Instead of condemning the rampant police brutality, the US State Department blamed the protesters themselves. Price stated, “we are troubled by scattered reports of violent demonstrations and by reports of attacks on the press and private property, including businesses.”
“When it comes to Peruvian President Dina Boluarte, we of course do recognize her as such. We will continue to work with Peru’s democratic institutions, and we look forward to working closely with President Boluarte and all branches of the government in Peru,” the former CIA agent stressed.
State Department on Peru ?? (Tuesday's daily presser):
– Commends Peru's institutions and authorities "for safeguarding democratic stability"
– "troubled by (..) violent demonstrations" and "reports of attacks on the press and private property"
– recognizes Dina Boluarte pic.twitter.com/AVj3F1cOds
— Camila (@camilapress) December 15, 2022

In addition to serving as a CIA agent for nine years and current US ambassador to Peru, Lisa Kenna worked as a:
At a Congressional nomination hearing on July 23, 2020, Kenna boasted of her US-supremacist worldview, stating, “The longer I have been in public service, the more I am convinced that America is the world’s most exceptional nation.”
She also vowed, “I will maintain the United States’ vital relationship with Peru which has long been one of our closest partners in the region. Recently, Mission Peru has performed heroically to sustain our strong partnership and serve our fellow Americans in these challenging times.”
At the time of the hearing, Peru had a right-wing government, led by President Martín Vizcarra.
Kenna praised Peru’s conservative government, “as founder of the Lima Group,” for backing the United States in its right-wing coup attempt against Venezuela’s democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro, claiming, “The U.S. and Peru are also growing our shared support for a peaceful return to democracy in Venezuela.”
She also pledged in the hearing that, as US ambassador to Peru: “I commit to meet with democratically oriented opposition figures”; “We also commit to meet with independent, local press in Peru”; and “I am committed to meeting with human rights, civil society, and other non governmental organizations in the United States and in Peru.”
Clarification: This article originally reported that the meeting between the US ambassador and Peruvian defense minister was on December 5, two days before the coup, based on an article in a local newspaper, but that media outlet appears to have been mistaken, and the actual meeting was on December 6, the day before the coup.


Instruction: Write an article about: Biden dice que Latinoamérica es el ‘patio delantero’ de EEUU, Trump dice ‘patio trasero’ – Escoge tu sabor de neocolonialismo. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: América Latina, colonialismo, Doctrina Monroe, Joe Biden, Latinoamérica

Output:
¿Cuál es la diferencia entre republicanos y demócratas? Trump dice “patio trasero” y Biden dice “patio delantero”. De otro modo, comparten el 95% de las mismas políticas imperialistas y capitalistas.

(You can read this article in English here.)
La gente en América Latina a menudo me pregunta cuál es la diferencia entre republicanos y demócratas. Para las personas fuera de Estados Unidos, los dos partidos hegemónicos parecen tan similares que es difícil diferenciarlos.
La realidad, por supuesto, es que el Partido Republicano y el Partido Demócrata son prácticamente idénticos. Cuando miramos más allá de todas las batallas superficiales de la Guerra Cultural que libran para distraer al público estadounidense, podemos ver claramente que los dos partidos de la clase dominante comparten el 95% de las mismas políticas — y están financiados por los mismos oligarcas capitalistas y corporaciones explotadoras, para servir sus intereses económicos obedientemente.
La administración de Joe Biden ha hecho que esto sea innegable. El presidente demócrata hizo campaña con promesas de revertir las desastrosas políticas del republicano Trump, sólo para continuar con la gran mayoría de ellas.
En una conferencia de prensa el 19 de enero, el actual presidente demócrata reveló accidentalmente cuál es la verdadera diferencia entre él y el ex mandatario republicano: Trump piensa que América Latina es el patio trasero del imperio estadounidense, mientras que Biden insiste en que es el “patio delantero” de Washington.
Puede ver los comentarios de Biden en la transcripción oficial publicada en la página oficial de la Casa Blanca:
“Solíamos hablar, cuando yo era un niño en la universidad, sobre el ‘patio trasero de Estados Unidos'”, dijo en la rueda de prensa. “No es el patio trasero de Estados Unidos. Todo al sur de la frontera mexicana es el patio delantero de Estados Unidos”.
U.S. maintains its Monroe Doctrine as Biden assures that Latin America is "America's front yard" pic.twitter.com/VhNxIVdV4Z
— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) January 20, 2022

Así que ahora, cuando la gente en Latinoamérica me pide que describa las diferencias entre republicanos y demócratas, tengo la respuesta perfecta: los republicanos piensan que eres su patio trasero, mientras que los demócratas piensan que eres su patio delantero.
Elige tu sabor favorito de neocolonialismo.
Biden ha estado en el poder por exactamente un año a partir de hoy, el 20 de enero. Y no ha logrado nada significativo. (Su retirada de Afganistán merece una mención honorífica, pero se ve eclipsada en gran medida por las políticas belicosas de Biden contra el resto del mundo, sin mencionar las devastadoras sanciones que su administración ha impuesto a Afganistán, que están matando de hambre a millones de civiles.)
Lejos de romper con Trump, Biden ha redoblado las peores políticas del ex presidente de extrema derecha:
Mientras tanto, dentro de Estados Unidos, el propio Partido Demócrata de Biden ha bloqueado todos los intentos de aprobar una legislación importante.
El gobierno de EEUU es tan antidemocrático, tan comprometido con el capital, que se ha convertido en un desastre disfuncional. Su fachada “democrática” se ha derretido, y todo lo que queda es un régimen autoritario controlado por oligarcas multimillonarios, una dictadura de la clase capitalista de manual.
Lo único que puede hacer el imperio estadounidense es hacer lo que siempre ha hecho: intensificar su agresión imperial en el extranjero, derramar dinero sin cesar en las fauces abiertas del Complejo Militar-Industrial, tratar de domar el apetito voraz del culto a la muerte del capitalismo — y usar la guerra en el extranjero para distraer la atención de la muerte masiva, la desigualdad vertiginosa, la pobreza creciente, la crisis de gente sin hogar, la brutalidad policial y el encarcelamiento masivo dentro de Estados Unidos.