a Ronald Thomas West assessment
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Our Vital National Interests
It’s pretty simple actually. The USA’s ‘vital national interests’ (and western democracies generally) is euphemism for corporate welfare, corporate welfare is all about the bottom line (profit) and profit historically has happened when we take raw material at gunpoint from disadvantaged nations. Modern corporate neo-colonialism creates social unrest and consequent fighting back which has evolved to ‘terror’, which in turn strengthens the market place in the ‘security’ or arms industry. The overthrow of Gaddafi (for reasons including he wasn’t buying high end weapons from France, following his ‘rehabilitation’) started brush fires (e.g. Mali) with his now unemployed mercenaries, ‘lost’ weapons flow and western trained guerillas/insurgents moved on to instances of ‘jihad’ the western powers feel must be in turn stamped out. This strengthens the cycle of spreading ‘terror’ which again strengthens the outlay for security, propping up western economies in what has become a war of civilizations.
In the case of Djibouti and a new one billion dollar drones base being built there, there is yet a French Foreign Legion presence hanging on from colonial era with the region surrounding nearby Somalia in process of destabilizing since Charles Grassley’s efforts provided a vast arsenal of American weapons to the regime of Mohammed Said Barre nearly 30 years ago. Barre in turn employed those weapons to wreak a biblical terror on his own nation. This has impacted from Ethiopia to Kenya and beyond.
When nations are in cycles of violence, their raw materials can be had on the cheap by corporations because of instability and attending corruption, increasing stock values from Frankfurt to London to Toronto to Wall Street.
The result at home? ‘Terror’ propaganda leading to the loss of civil liberties and increasing consolidation of the corporate-power corrupt over the vast and spreading malignancy of the entire cycle. This fact can only lead to our national demise when you factor in the western democracies own ‘jihadis’, i.e. extreme ‘Christian Taliban’ personalities attracted to the ‘security’ business. Now days the Pentagon is fundamentalist Christian crusader central and has moved from ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ to ‘the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim’ as a matter of policy in a pursuit of world-wide “manifest destiny.” And so reality is created for us and reality is pointed to literal Armageddon, the consequence of living beyond our means.
The other side of this coin is, if the arms and related ‘security’ expenditures were halted, the resulting jobs loss would finish collapsing the western democracies economic engines, where the armaments industries are a critical component of the dynamic propping up our infrastructure.
What are the chances the western democratic leaders will surrender ego to reality and begin dismantling this hydra? Not good when reality is we should be moving towards construction of changed climate Hobbit burrows to survive.
What’s happening isn’t rocket science, but it is a trap-
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Ronald Thomas West 