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Olympic Games Make US Regime Paranoid and Unpredictable

by David William Pear

North Korean cheerleaders wave unification flags during Team Korea’s ice hockey game against Sweden at the Gwandong Ice Hockey Center in Gangneung, Monday. / Yonhap, Korean Times http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/sports/2018/02/702_244132.html


Despite all the efforts of a paranoid and unpredictable US regime, the Koreans are making peace not war during the 2018 Winter Olympics. The US is furious and pulling out all the stops to tarnish the Games, and it is trying to put South Korea back on the US colonial leash. South Korea’s democratically elected peace-president Moon Jae-in is showing signs that he is not an America poodle on a short leash.
Even during the Olympics, the US feels threatened by peace, unity and cooperation. Like a drone hurling bombs at wedding parties and funerals, the US regime tries to sabotage the Olympics’ peaceful spirit. The US feels the need to flex its military muscle in order to feel strong and powerful. A large group of high value targets which the US cannot control triggers an algorithm of paranoia in want of a signature strike. The US habit is to shoot first and ask questions later.

US Weaponized the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics

As Obama said, “I have two words for you, Predator Drone.” It worked for Obama during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. For almost eight years Russia had been preparing for the celebration of its emergence from the ashes of chaos sown by US neoliberal economists that preached privatization, looting of state enterprises, and austerity for Russian citizens during the decade of the 1990’s.
The US economic advisors to Russia’s president Boris Yeltsin led Russia down a yellow brick road they said would lead to a golden transformation from communism to Western-style capitalism. When the neoliberal transformation turned into an economic train wreck the US Nobel Prize winning economists from the Chicago School of Economics said it was just a temporary hard landing. The Russians had had enough of US-style voodoo economics and elected Vladimir Putin as their leader. Putin told the Chicago boys thank you very much, showed the economic shamans and their cronies to the exit door and kicked them out of Russia. The US would never forgive Putin and they would go on to do everything they could to shun, vilify and regime-change him.
During the years while Vladimir Putin was engineering a recovery of Russia’s economy, the US regime was spending $5 billion plotting a coup d’etat in Ukraine. The putsch came while Russia was distracted celebrating the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. To prepare the US public for a resumption of a US-led Cold War the international cartel of Western propaganda organs had been laying the groundwork of anti-Russian propaganda for years. The Russia vilification project was to smear Vladimir Putin as a thug, homophobic killer of journalists, invader of Georgia, and an evil dictator. Later Putin would be accused of invading Ukraine. Western anti-Russian propaganda turns the truth upside down.
While the Russians and the rest of the world celebrated in Sochi, fascist agent provocateurs instigated a violent overthrow of Russia’s neighbor (and the heart of Russia’s historical civilization) Ukraine and its democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych.
After the coup became a fact on the ground, fascist groups such as Svoboda, Right Sector, OUN and the Azov Battalion became emboldened, especially after the visit to Ukraine by CIA director John Brennan in April 2014. Fascists supported by the US were given military aid; and they are hero worshipers of Stepan Bandera, and his ideology of anti-Semitic white supremacy and Ukrainian nationalism. Ukrainian nationalism advocates the ethnic cleansing of Ukraine in what is called anti-terrorist operations (pogroms), indiscriminate shelling of cities and the massacre of civilians.
Ukrainian fascists have committed lynches and atrocities against those that opposed the putsch; oppose fascist Ukrainian nationalism, Russian speaking Ukrainians, Jews, homosexuals, non-whites, and ethnic Russians. Ukrainian fascists have been responsible for violence such as in Odessa where scores of anti-coup activists were burned to death in the House of Trade Unions building, reminiscent of WW2 war crimes of forcing people into buildings and burning them alive.
When the historically Russian Crimean Peninsula’s ethnic Russian population voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia, Putin would be accused by Western propaganda of invading Crimea. Western propaganda kept making front page news that Russia had invaded Ukraine with little green men, but when the evidence proved false the retractions were buried.
Many Russians have relatives, friends and deep ties to Ukraine. It is to be expected that some Russians would voluntarily jointed the Donbass and Lugansk (eastern Ukraine) separatist movements and self-defense forces. Russia still openly sends truck convoys of humanitarian aid to the cutoff eastern Ukraine, and has acknowledged having limited covert personnel in Donbass and Lugansk, but no invasion.
The US, which has illegally invaded dozens of countries since World War Two, chose to lead an economic sanction regime against Russia over its annexation of Crimea, its limited involvement in Ukraine, and Russia’s legal military aid to Syria. The real motive of the US seems to be to intensify the Cold War for geopolitical reasons.

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up Department

In the you can’t make this stuff up department: US educated and John McCain buddy Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia who attacked ethnic Russians in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008, was given Ukrainian citizenship in 2014. Saakashvili had fled Georgia to avoid criminal arrest. In 2015 he was appointed the mayor of the Odessa region; along with many other carpetbaggers to Ukraine. In 2017 Saakashvili was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship and he fled to the US. He is now wanted by Ukrainian authorities.
For those that don’t remember, Saakashvili was the one who set off the Russo-Georgia war, which Western propaganda turned upside down and accused Putin of invading Georgia. Is it a coincident that this all happened during the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics? More likely, it was a coincident and had to do with US elections.
Saakashvili attacked South Ossetia and Abkhazia during his friend John McCain’s failed presidential bid against Barack Obama. McCain tried to use the trouble to boost his election chances, which were about sunk. McCain who is virulently anti-Russian embarrassed himself by saying, “today, we are all Georgians”. That battle cry against Russia gave him little traction. McCain still says he is a Georgian, but his old friend Saakashvili is a man without a country.

US Politicizes 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics

For the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea the US has been ramping up tensions and imposing more economy killer-sanctions (i.e. embargo-blockade) on North Korea. South Korea is championed for the propaganda value that democracy and Western-style capitalism produced its miracle economy; while it is said that North Korea cannot feed its own people: so let’s add tougher sanctions?
Miracles only happen in fairytales, and South Korea’s miracle economy took billions of dollars in US aid, and a US $55 billion bailout of South Korea’s in 1997. South Korea did not develop under Western democracy and capitalism; it developed under military dictatorships and a planned export economy.
In 2017 the US regime got a sneaking suspicion that things were not going as planned. The feisty South Korean people said they had had enough of the US-backed president Park Geun-hye, granddaughter of the US-backed military dictator Park Chung-hee, who ruled from 1963 to 1979. In late 2016 the South Korean people began mass protests, holding candlelight vigils demanding the impeachment of Park Geun-hye.
Candlelight vigils have become a tradition of South Korean protesters since the 2002 killing of a South Korean girl by US occupation soldiers. When the soldiers were being court martialed by the US military, the South Korean people held candlelight vigils demanding justice. They didn’t get it. The soldiers were found not guilty, but the non-violent candlelight vigils continued as a tradition of political protest.
The candlelight vigils against Park Geun-hye grew in 2017 until the South Korean parliament was forced to respond and impeach Park for corruption and influence peddling. Park Geun-hye is now in prison, where her grandfather should have once been too, if an assassin’s bullet had not found him first in 1979. Her grandfather had also been a collaborator during Korea’s humiliation of Japanese colonialism. Collaboration and corruption run in the family.
In the May 2017 elections that followed Park’s ouster the South Korean people, especially the younger generation, said they had had enough of US instigated animosity between them and their Northern brothers and sisters. Moon Jae-in ran an election campaign on a platform of anti-cronyism with industry, increased social programs for the people and a Sunshine Policy 2, similar to that of former President Kim Dae-jung. Moon won a landslide victory on his platform of peace and social justice.
The US regime has been sulking, plotting and hyperventilating with sarcasm, saber rattling and retaliation against both South Korea and North Korea for resuming relations that had been put on pause in 2008 with the election of hardliner Lee Myung-bak. Before Moon could even take office in May, the US regime humiliated him and caused him to lose face in April by putting THAAD missiles in South Korea. Thousands of South Koreans protested against the THAAD’s, but since the US has military operational (colonial) control in South Korea the peoples’ protests were ignored. Instead the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson rained on the Sunshine before it even dawned.
In April 2017 Tillerson was already advocating tougher economic sanctions against North Korea. For months now the US has been raising the volume of the rhetoric against North Korea, threatening war, installing THAAD missiles, shipping more nukes to Guam, and tightening the screws of the embargo. All options are on the table except the diplomatic option.
Vice President Pence even refused to stand with everyone else during the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. That was more than bad manners in Korea where face and harmony are socially important, and it reflects badly on the US. According to the Korean Times, Pence later said that he was “opposed to inter-Korean talks until North Korea agreed to start negotiations on denuclearization”.
Pence continues the propaganda word games on negotiations: it is the US that refuses to negotiate until North Korea meets certain preconditions. The US will not even say what the preconditions are and may not know itself. The US vacillates on talks from one day to the next and depending on who is speaking: Trump, Tillerson, Pence or the State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert. The North Koreans have consistently offered to negotiate without any preconditions. The mainstream media rarely is honest, usually telling the public that the North Koreans “refuse to come to the negotiation table”.
To make sure that he spoils the good mood of the Olympics, Pence announced that the US would, “soon unveil the toughest and most aggressive round of economic sanctions on North Korea ever”. An embargo is war by other means. Christine Ahn of Women Cross DMZ said to The Real News Network that the US economic embargo is a “policy of strangulation”.
The embargo is siege warfare like that used in the Ancient Era. The US is holding North Korean children hostage, and it is literally saying that it will kill one North Korean child every day until North Korea bends to the US will. This is barbaric, uncivilized and inhumane. It is a war crime and a crime against humanity. It is against the Geneva Conventions, even though the embargo was authorized by the UN Security Council.
After the First Gulf War and during the 1990’s UN Security Council embargo of Iraq, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reminded the parties involved that:

Any decision by the Security Council to impose economic sanctions in the course of an armed conflict has to be in conformity with international humanitarian law, in particular with the provisions on relief for needy civilians as set out by the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

With the knowledge of hindsight we know that the economic embargo against Iraq killed over 500,000 Iraqi children. Even knowing that, the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a person without a human conscience, said on television that “IT WAS WORTH IT”.
Any coercion of one country against another is aggression, especially if that country is acting within it legal rights as a sovereign nation. North Korea has broken no international law and it has as much right as South Korea, Japan and the US to have nuclear power for electricity, to test missiles; and it has as much right as the US to have a nuclear arms program and nuclear bombs.
North Korea has not committed aggression against any other country or threatened to attack anyone except in self-defense. The US, its allies and the UN have overstepped their bounds in punishing North Korea for what it has every legal right to do. If the US is so concerned about nuclear proliferation, then it should start living up to its own obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which the US has not done, and go talk to their friends Pakistan, India, and Israel.
It should be remembered that the US was the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Korean Peninsula. It is a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for the nuclear armed US to threaten a non-nuclear power, which is why North Korea has developed nuclear weapons. In 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower unilaterally nullified paragraph 13(d) of the 1953 Armistice Agreement and introduced nuclear weapons into South Korea (YouTube).
Economic embargos kill by restricting the imports of food, medicine, fuel and other essentials. Economic embargos deny the victim the ability to export its products in exchange for hard currency, puts a freeze on their foreign assets, and makes international monetary transactions nearly impossible. In the 21 st century economic sanctions, embargos, blockades, call them whatever; they are siege warfare, and a weapon of mass destruction. Embargos kill civilians and non-combatants indiscriminately and disproportionately. It is by definition a war crime.
North Korea has proven that the US propaganda that it refuses to sit at the negotiation table is a lie. The North Koreans have offered time and again to negotiate with the US, it has offered to suspend its nuclear program, and North Korea has even offered multiple times to negotiate a final peace treaty to the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice, but not a final peace. North Korea and South Korea are at the negotiation table now.
North Korea and South Korea are meeting, talking and marching under a unified flag. The US is throwing a tantrum and accusing Kim Jong-un’s extended olive branch as being a dirty trick. The US says that Kim Jong-un is just trying to divide South Korea from the US. The US regime is humiliating South Korean by saying that they are weak, off the colonial leash, and going it alone without paternalistic protection.

Conclusion

South Korea and North Korea have taken the initiative to resolve their differences peacefully. The US is trying to abort the peace process, it is acting aggressively, it is engaged in war by other means, and it is illegally imposing an embargo on North Korea. The embargo is siege warfare and a weapon of mass destruction that kills indiscriminately and disproportionately non-combatants, especially the young, the elderly and the sick. The US is committing a premeditated war crime and a crime against humanity.
The US has victimized Korea since the US first invaded it in 1871. The US backed the Japanese subjugation and colonization of Korea when the US mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The US interfered in the Korean Civil War of 1950 to 1953, killing several million Koreans and destroying every city, town, village and the civilian infrastructure in North Korea and much of South Korea. The US has refused repeated offers by North Korea to negotiate a final peace treaty to the Korean War, and the US has perpetuated the unnatural division of Korea. Korea deserves the liberation and independence the US promised them at the end of World War Two in 1945. All the US needs to do is get out of the way and let the Koreans decide their own destiny.

David William Pear, currently serving as a senior contributing editor for The Greanville Post, is a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. He is also a regular columnist and commenter on OpedNews. His articles have also been published by The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Russia Insider, Pravda and many other progressive publications. Photo, steps of City Hall, St. Petersburg, Florida.

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George Cornell
George Cornell
Feb 20, 2018 5:26 PM

The US has not gotten used to losing, much less losing with grace. They need to do something because it looks like handfuls of losing are in their cards. So on the syndicated talk show PTI the discussants were saying the piss poor showing by American athletes in Pyeyongjang was a reflection of the fact that America just doesn’t have winter anymore. As if any figure skating events are outdoors. Ah, Global Warming to the rescue of tossers.
When they were winning they were unconcerned about not having winters in some states and they might have pointed out that their glorification of their nonsensical inflated (they will be campaigning for left handed swimming events) swimming medals in summer games never mentions that most of the world does not swim, much less have swimming pools.
Beaten like rented mules in Korea by countries with 5% of their population, their tv coverage is more or less restricted to American athletes and since so few are winning, the announcers must talk about their nice uniforms.

Grafter
Grafter
Feb 17, 2018 11:05 PM

Ask yourselves….US involvement….all over the world ??. What right have these imperialist psycopaths have any “right” to interfere with any country on our planet ? Their MIC scum are behind all this for what? Financial gain and world domination !! Really ?? The American people need to wake up very soon otherwise we have another global class nutter armed to the teeth killing all who cross their path with indiscriminate killing.

fonald
fonald
Feb 18, 2018 9:53 PM
Reply to  Grafter

what are you talking about? Be specific, please, your comment makes no sense…”the american people need to wake up etc. WHATIS MICscum? Would u have preferred HRC be their President?

tony0pmoc
tony0pmoc
Feb 17, 2018 6:28 PM

Brilliant post by David William Pear, who cuts through the nonsense, like a very high energy laser knife.
A joy to read, despite the awful reality, which he completely disseminates, and lays bare.
A true wordsmith
Thank You.
Tony

loner51
loner51
Feb 17, 2018 12:06 AM

So tired of hearing about the US and other Governments (including Australia) trying to start another war. We the general public talk about how terrible it is our Governments are, yet we are apparently powerless to do anything about it! How do the people of South American countries manage to have a coup d’état? Why can’t we do something to topple these inept, lying, megalomaniacal leaders of our so-called democratic countries? Financial greed seems to be the root of a lot of it, with religion being the powder keg that gets pushed by the ones who are pushing for war. Keep everyone poor and frightened seems to be a catchphrase within the hierarchy.
Someone out there must know how to lead us into a peaceful coexistence, surely not everyone is totally devoid of humanitarian goodness, who is prepared to be honest and look to peace and quiet.
I know I’m going to be ridiculed and told I’m dreaming, but aren’t we entitled to peace and harmony without it costing us our all?

auntiebuna
auntiebuna
Feb 17, 2018 10:39 AM
Reply to  loner51

I can answer your question about how South American countries manage a coup d’etat: when U.S. oligarchs want their natural resources, the CIA stages a coup and a new puppet dictator is born. Sorry you are “tired” of hearing about how the United States and its allies keep on starting wars. Some of us think people need the truth.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Feb 17, 2018 10:53 AM
Reply to  auntiebuna

You cannot overestimate the contempt held for the US in Latin America. They do not have a single friend south of the Rio Grande, except for the few small nations who find it convenient to pretend. Maybe it has something to do with the chronic relentless pillaging and meddling.

Big B
Big B
Feb 17, 2018 10:54 AM
Reply to  loner51

@loner51: the people of South America have a revolutionary psyche: enhanced by Marxist-Syndicalist ideology of those who were kicked out by Franco. The Critical Theorists did as much as anyone to understand why we are the “turkeys that vote for christmas”. A combination of the Marxist ideas of “false consciousness” and “commodity fetishm”. The fictitious propaganda of the meritocracy and the inculcation of lifestyle-selling advertising: converts enough of the proletariat into wannabe capitalists. The rest are addicted to spectacle and distracted into hedonism. The dominant culture is totalising and inculcating: right down to the dinner table through the family structure. Perception of external and internal reality are self-managed in response to controlled and designated cultural and identitarian archetypes. Our very identity is state-sanctioned; culturally conditioned; and orientated toward state hierarchical authority. And the crux of what Bernay’s called the ‘invisible government’ of perception management: is that it is packaged and sold as libertarian, democratising and free.
There is no one out here that can do it for us. Popular movements can be infiltrated (COINTELPRO), co-opted, and recuperated into the service of the dominant power structure. There will be no external revolution, not without internal evolution. The revolution will not be televised, it will be life itself? You are the next MLK?
When there enough like-minded peacefully coexisting people, actively engaged in building the “beloved community”, the authority and power base of the dominant ‘state of mind’ will “wither away”. There is nothing to ridicule and everything to dream for in that?

Jen
Jen
Feb 16, 2018 9:01 PM

On the whole, a good article that presents a credible alternative history of US relations with NE Asia and the way the US has used the region as a buffer against China and the then Soviet Union (and now Russia) by dividing the Koreans and setting them against each other, and exploiting Japan’s own ambitions to keep Korea weak and divided. There are some errors of fact – Park Geun-hye is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, not the granddaughter , and Park Chung-hee was responsible for setting South Korea on its path towards the miracle economy with a style of leadership and methods we’d regard as, uh, Stalinesque – but the main themes of the article I have no problem with.

archie1954
archie1954
Feb 16, 2018 8:59 PM

The US has so much to answer for. I’m really surprised that it hasn’t been bombed back to the stone age itself.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Feb 16, 2018 9:05 PM
Reply to  archie1954

The might is right approach to world affairs is kinda Stone Age already.

fonald
fonald
Feb 18, 2018 10:01 PM
Reply to  George Cornell

yet countries like N. Korea continue to spend every dime building up their military while starving their people. And opposing would-be world domineers continue to provide military technological support despite signing agreements agreeing not to do so. Its about time america gets tough with these duplicitis quasi -authritarian regimes.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Feb 18, 2018 11:47 PM
Reply to  fonald

They do that because they are afraid you will make them the next Eye-Raq. They have zero interest in being world domineering. They have invaded exactly nobody and have zero bases in other lands. You are projecting.

milosevic
milosevic
Feb 26, 2018 3:34 PM
Reply to  fonald

Its about time america gets tough with these duplicitis quasi -authritarian regimes.
Like “America” “got tough” with Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya, none of which countries, just coincidentally, had nuclear weapons? What lesson did the North Korean government learn from the fate of those countries, do you suppose?
This is a textbook example of what the Saker website calls “ideological drones”, right down to the drooling illiteracy.
http://thesaker.is/when-sanity-fails-the-mindset-of-the-ideological-drone/

Manda
Manda
Feb 16, 2018 7:04 PM

Great article pulling together a good overview.
I re-watched ‘The Princes of Yen’. based on Prof Richard Werner’s book, the other day and feel it is very relevant showing how western led international financial system has (forcibly) restructured many economies, making banks independent and liberalizing the economies a la Neoliberalism. US and its dollar as world reserve currency (and military clout) is an important lever in this process in my opinion.

Most is re Japan but from 1.07.00 approx S. Korea and other Asian so called Tiger Economies summarized and Eurozone mentioned.

bevin
bevin
Feb 16, 2018 6:32 PM

A fine summary by Pear. It should be noted that The Greanville Post is a very useful tool for imperialism’s critics.
The US position on Korea runs very deep. The US has prevented anything approaching unification or lowering of tensions for the past seventy years because Korea is where its Asian policy is founded. Remove the effective occupation of South Korea, and the long siege of the north which it implies, and the whole US policy in east Asia falls apart like the proverbial house of cards, leaving US interests protected only by the Japanese ultra right, which is trying to defy nature by resisting Chinese and Russian overtures, Chiang ‘s legacy the pseudo state of Taiwan and the perennially corrupt Philippine kleptocracy. And as that crumbles so will the settler states on Australia and New Zealand. The Cold War will be over, finally. Perhaps Trudeau’s ‘personkind’ will then settle down to the urgent work of preserving the planet.
In the meantime these are very dangerous moments-absent a major war or trembling on its brink, the US quest for hegemony is at a critical stage. For the junta in Washington and their, none too bright though very clever, financier sponsors , without the twin strategic prizes of Korea (so close to China and Russia’s borders) and Israel ( a wrecking ball posing as a national refuge) in the Levant it is Game Over.
And when that happens we can all have a party.
WordPress.com / Gravatar.com credentials can be used.

bevin
bevin
Feb 16, 2018 6:34 PM
Reply to  bevin

As to that party the World Cup would be a good place for it.

Mikalina
Mikalina
Feb 26, 2018 9:36 PM
Reply to  bevin

Oh, to be in Moscow in the summer. The sky is a blue you will never see anywhere else – and if you can find a golden cupola to view in the foreground of the clarity of this blue, looking up, the scene will be seared onto the back of your eyes forever.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Feb 16, 2018 7:19 PM
Reply to  bevin

Australia , the neocon US mini-me, yes , NZ thinks for itself.

fandango
fandango
Feb 16, 2018 6:09 PM

The next logical question then is a simple one;
What has the USA in store for the upcoming World Cup in Russia?
Carnage, no doubt. By a deniable proxy such as IS?
I have noticed Russia in Syria every other month making clear announcements that the FSA/Nusra/WH are planning to stage more chemical attacks. Preempting the production show. Calling them out on their antics. Russia should do the same with the US before the tournament begins. Big fucking chart highlighting US carnage coinciding with world sporting events. Along side a chart showing how much money US arms and oil industry has relocated from the Middle East and Afghanistan since the war on terror began. It must be well over double digit trillions by now?

Karl Kolchak
Karl Kolchak
Feb 17, 2018 12:55 AM
Reply to  fandango

Probably nothing since the wimpy and weak U.S. team is already eliminated!

fonald
fonald
Feb 18, 2018 10:08 PM
Reply to  fandango

next time you see Russia make these,in advance notices in Syria, let me know please….areu in Syria? lol, I am serious, please prove this ridiculous assertuin, in advance, next time it happens ok? Or provide the previous warnings you have seen. ANY evidence at all of your claims will be appreciated.

Big B
Big B
Feb 16, 2018 5:53 PM

Brilliant post and synopsis of the current, soon to be diffused tensions, which the Washington imperial hegemon will not allow to be diffused: purely for the sake of its own protectionist foreign policy. But clicking on the links …

”North Korea is the ultimate consequence of socialism, which always contains the seeds of its own destruction. Socialism goes against human nature, requiring its government to become increasingly authoritarian — North Korea being Exhibit A. Or socialism collapses with or without violence, from the inherent rot caused by a nonfunctioning price system — the Soviet Union being Exhibit B. Or socialism is voted out of power (where it has not yet destroyed all of democracy), and the price system and private ownership are restored, the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher being Exhibit C.”

…this, written by a brainwashed capitalist automaton, blew my mind. Richard W. Rahn wants South Korea to deregulate and neoliberalise, to further integrate into the inherent rot caused by the biggest nonfunctioning price system in history – the post-market economy. The G7 central banks have colluded to blow a QE fuelled global super-bubble. There is no Plan B; there can be no exit strategy – between them they have to keep colluding to inflate the full range of asset classes until …
There is no need to take my word for it. Trump’s new Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, has indicated as much in the recently declassified FOMC minutes from 2012. ” Meanwhile, we look like we are blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road. You can almost say that that is our strategy.” Former Fed-insider Danielle DiMartino Booth has whistleblown on the Fed’s doctrinaire policy-making. And Nomi Prins has dedicated her upcoming book, Collu$ion, to detailing the subject, country by country. Only not from a socialist POV.
All the time the return on capital remains financially engineered to outpace economic development by central bank collusion: the wealth gap can only widen. There is no Plan B. Given the choice of reinvesting capital into R&D, technology, paying better benefits and wages, expanding the business …or using the (nearly) free ZIRP capital to indulge in mergers & acquisitions; or share buybacks – the capitalist will always choose the greatest return for them. And so the workers get incrementally excluded from the economy. Is that human nature: pure unadulterated short-term greed? Does that lend toward community building: or the increased authoritarianism of enforced private property rights and rentierism …as public goods get hocked back to those who can still afford to pay? Does creating a billionaire uberclass favour democracy: or an apartheid of an exclusive plutocratic self-protectionist autarchy …a state-corporate participatory government: in which the electorate no longer participate? Is that human nature?
Quoting the dialectic of contradictions that lead to collapse: is the post-market collusive interventionist globalised economy sustainable? When it hits crisis or collapses (the Fed has no more tools to effect a recovery – DiMartino Booth: Fed Up): will that not be destructive? Who will pick up the eternally unpayable tab? The capitalists who caused it? Offloading risk and gambling with the future: with no regard for environmental degradation or social consequence …is that not destructive? Is that human nature?
I am planning a small peer-funded cooperative venture manufacturing pitchforks and Phrygian caps, should anyone want to join me? I feel sales could soon be about to take off?

milosevic
milosevic
Feb 26, 2018 3:50 PM
Reply to  Big B

pitchforks and Phrygian caps
Don’t forget the guillotines, there will eventually be an expanding market for them.

intergenerationaltrauma
intergenerationaltrauma
Feb 16, 2018 5:44 PM

Excellent article. Thank you. Our country’s foreign policy embrace of the neocon’s and their own peculiar madness appears to have finally turned the entire nation into a very large open-air insane asylum. The evidence-free belief in “Russiagate” seems a sort of modern day equivalent of “Saint Vitus Dance,” rapidly sweeping through the population, but unfortunately with nuclear weapons at the disposal of we the afflicted. Irrational hysteria has become the norm. What could possibly go wrong? You can’t make this stuff up.

summitflyer
summitflyer
Feb 16, 2018 4:20 PM

It is time for the US to let go of South Korea and let them fly so to speak .If the North and South want to re-unify ,then let them do so under their negotiated terms and God bless them .
The imperialism that exudes from the US is passé and needs to just become history and let the world move on .I am sure that the Americans will still be part of the team as they should be .The human team.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Feb 16, 2018 5:22 PM
Reply to  summitflyer

Americans have not been part of the “human” team for a long time. What kind of sicko wacko mad dog government is actually upset that the Koreas are warming to each other? They need to rename their personnel departments. Dept. of subHuman resources has a nice ring.
I thank the author of this piece for bush whacking through the jungle of American lies and propaganda.

fonald
fonald
Feb 18, 2018 10:14 PM
Reply to  summitflyer

The U.S. Would love NOTHING more than that!!! WTF r u talking about. (As long as they stop their nuclear proliferating nonsense. It would save us alot of money. You actually think WELIKE to spend all this money defending our weak sisters over there? Your an idiot.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Feb 18, 2018 11:03 PM
Reply to  fonald

Well don’t spend your money on them then and do the world a favour by minding your own business. Your own business might be seen to include your pathetic health care outcomes, your falling down bridges, your third world roads, your dysfunctional semblance of a democracy, the abysmal disrespect you have earned from your neighbours, and your racial hatred, egregious crime rates, climate change denial, and your propensity to break every treaty you sign.
And while you are at it, please note you won’t find people calling each other idiots on this site. So may I suggest you return to your GI Joe comics and your World Wrestling Federation website.

milosevic
milosevic
Feb 26, 2018 3:54 PM
Reply to  fonald

Your an idiot.
No, you’re an illiterate moron.

Alan
Alan
Feb 16, 2018 4:12 PM

Well researched and articulate post. One wonders what war the US is actually fighting? What we view as individual wars since the 20th century appear as battles within an endless war from a US foreign policy perspective.

Mikalina
Mikalina
Feb 16, 2018 3:22 PM

Brilliant.
I think we can now re-visit our preconceived wisdom of ‘civil war’ through our knowledge of Syria, Honduras, Venezuela, etc. The accepted story that South and North Korea were/are at war and the US are supporting plucky South Korea against the communist hordes has become farcical as our eyes are opened with historical accounts (conveniently disappeared) that parallel the machinations of the US today. Thousands of South Koreans had to be killed before the ‘country’ came together under the chosen dictator including during Korea’s own My Lai, No Gun Ri.

milosevic
milosevic
Feb 26, 2018 3:58 PM
Reply to  Mikalina

Thousands of South Koreans had to be killed
More accurately, hundreds of thousands, before the official war even started.

vierotchka
vierotchka
Feb 16, 2018 2:59 PM

Meanwhile: