On Imperial Corruption and Hubris

Giving it all away

Not content with spending over $180 billion of US taxpayer wealth on project Ukraine, most of which goes directly to the US armaments industry, while the rest is extravagantly splurged on what even the Pentagon (having failed its 11th successive audit) admits in its most recent quarterly report to Congress is a corrupt regime that has filtered off at least $2 billion of “aid” to private (i.e.criminal) interests, the US regime of an angry President with diminishing mental faculty has asked Congress to approve the giving away of yet another $24 billion (I am unsure if this includes the $6 remaining from last April’s Congressional award of $61billiion).

Incidentally, by March of 2024 a total of 41 countries had given away a total $380 billion.

Of the new $24 billion Biden is offering $8 billion is for military aid and $16 billion is to replace US-provided military equipment that presumably now rusts, charred, on Ukrainian battlefields.

What a glorious scam! The more that Russia destroys the richer are the US armaments profiteers.

To further “Trump-proof” the scam, Congress pontificates to Zelenskiy (whom it will likely undermine and jettison in April by insisting on elections that will push Zaluzhniy into power) that he should reduce the age of conscription from 25 to 18.

That might keep the war going a few more months and promises a roaring trade for the death industry.

And of course Western escalation of the conflict even following Russian demonstration of the non-nuclear power of the Oreshnik, promises more untold loss of life amidst riches for ever growing Lockheed and its brethren.

Ukraine is now asking for US for Tomahawks (range 2780 kilometers) which will put all of “European” Russia within range - in retaliation for which we should reasonably expect nuclear or nonnuclear Oreshnik attacks on Kiev, Moldavia, London, Brussels or Los Angeles.

Trump’s silence, meantime, may signal:

(1) he is content with Washington’s own corruption since his own Cabinet will soon benefit from it (until Armageddon);

(2) Or that he considers that the last desperate Biden gambits will indeed, he falsely believes, make Russia more pliable at the negotiation table;

(3) Or, less likely, he is worried about the Michael Flynn scandal from 2016/2017 when Flynn was falsely accused and imprisoned on the basis of the FBI lie that Flynn, before the Trump administration had taken office, had illegally promised Russia a reduction of US sanctions on Russia if Russia retained from the retaliating against Obama’s final aggression against Russia.

That might have counseled this second Trump admin team against anything that might look like a similar premature deal. Flynn’s imprisonable offense was that he “lied” to the FBI. He hadn’t. Yet even when the truth was revealed in transcripts, the judge in his case kept him locked up until Flynn was “pardoned” by the outgoing Trump in 2020.

Is there anything about Trump that might suggest he can see beyond the ideologically fanatic, hubristic, militarist and incompetent democratic policies of interventionism?

Hardly. In addition to Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the intermediate range missile treaty in his first administration he and his regime demonstrated ignorance and incompetence in the face of clear evidence during the first that Russia had not simply achieved nuclear parity with the West but had far surpassed it.

Gilbert Doctorow has just reposted his assessment for Consortium News from Spring 2018 of Putin’s announcement, days before his re-election as President, of Russia’s new cycle of nuclear capabilities.

These included “several major new and technically unparalleled offensive nuclear weapons” that would be “invincible to any known or prospective” US air defense developed since Bush’s unilateral abandonment a decade earlier of the ABM treaty.

In 2018 US nuclear strategy was based on the idea of a preemptive ABM first strike folllowed by a mopping up of residual Russian nuclear attacks.

Russia had now responded to this with a counter strategy of highly maneuverable and Mach 10 and Mach 20 missiles and underwater drones that have in effect rendered useless the entire US (and UK) navy - as I have discussed here in recent posts.

At the time, as Doctorow presciently observed, Western mainstream media simply could not fathom either that there had been an arms race since Bush abandoned the ABM treaty, nor that Russia had won that race. Instead they employed weasel words of pretended understanding: “claims,””in development”, “bluff,” and “failed state.”

Western intelligence, even despite Russian recovery of the Crimea; Russian success in Syria; Russian establishment under US noses of a joint intelligence center with Iraq and Iran in Baghdad…suffering for many decades of a debilitating Cold War mythology - from “conceptual poverty” … had punctured itself by gutting US intelligence capabilities in understanding Russia and adopting a decadent “quick fix” mentality in the form of the privatization of both military and intelligence bureaucracies.

We cannot expect much more wisdom from the viscerally anti-Chinese Trump in 2025 than we saw in the indolence of Trump 1 years. The US pivot to the East, which foolishly assumed a tamed Russia that would give away its wealth to US corporations, is coming apart at the seams.

The latest and dramatic manifestation of this is the war that has now broken out in the Philippines between the Washington-tamed President Marcos and the pro-Chinese Vice President Duterte camp whose mutual threats of assassination this week pierce an ongoing process of rapid political destabilization.

The substance of this is a no-brainer (as it is for nearly all of Asia):

For the Philippines, Washington can only deliver impoverishment. China delivers guaranteed prosperity because China is far and away the country’s most important trading partner.

China has a market of 1.5 billion; the US has a market of only 300 billion.

And Trump wants to radically reduce even that number.