PETER KOENIG—Wars have a cost – a financial, economic and a social cost. [Not to mention ecological costs, which is literally incalculable.] The US official military budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 is US$ 700 billion; for FY 2019 Trump proposes US$ 750. If approved it would be a 40% increase in the last 9 years. But that’s not all. This is just the officially published figure. The real cost for the war, defense and security apparatus to which also the opaque CIA and associated secret services count – is well over a trillion dollars, perhaps as much as US$1.5 trillion – per year.
WASHINGTON’S VASSALS
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American Exceptionalism is at the root of the Fake News Epidemic Attempting to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution
18 minutes readDANNY HAIPHONG—Another lie promoted under the guise of American exceptionalism is the notion that Venezuela is ruled by a repressive authoritarian regime. This is a particularly sinister lie steeped in Cold War anti-communist racism. Venezuela has held several elections since the Hugo Chavez was first elected as head of state in 1998. Jimmy Carter declared the Venezuelan electoral system the most democratic in the world in 2012. The opposition has run in every election since 1998 with varying degrees of success. Much of the opposition boycotted the last presidential election in fear that they would lose by legitimate means, thus debunking the myth that the opposition represents a majority in the nation.
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Russia-gate was meant to deflect the DNC rigging of the 2016 primary against Bernie Sanders. It has since morphed into a useful multi-tool for different factions in our corrupt government. The MSM has managed to distract from Trump’s actual crimes and collusion with Israel and Saudi Arabia. They don’t hate Trump, they fucking love him!
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RON RIDENOUR—Putin saw that US foreign policy is built on military supremacy, so he set forth a policy of rearming the Russian military to defend the country against any aggressions launched by the US. Already the next year, 2008, he let the US know that Russia would not allow it to bring Georgia or the Ukraine into NATO, thus surrounding Russia all the more.Russia didn’t attack Georgia first, another US lie. Even the former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice later admitted that it was Georgia, which started that war.South Ossetia and Abkhazia were independent states that Georgia President Mikjail Saakashvili attacked, killing many of them and some Russian troops before Russia fired back. The Russo-Georgian War showed that Russia’s conventional military power mattered. Russia sent an army to Georgia of equal size to Georgia’s, which had been poorly trained by the US/NATO, and defeated it in four days, in August 2008.
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Trump Threatens Nuclear War If Russia Protects Venezuela
28 minutes readERIC ZUESSE—Why does John Bolton keep coming back to power in the US? Because he represents America’s billionaires no matter what, and because the US Government does, too — it doesn’t represent America’s public; it represents only the individuals who overwhelmingly finance America’s politicians; and those politicians, in turn, represent the 585 US billionaires’ interests, and not the interests (the priorities) of the American public. The public are merely to be manipulated, not represented. That’s why we invaded Iraq. That’s why we invaded Libya. That’s why we invaded Syria. That’s why the US regime took over Ukraine. That’s why it now is trying to take over Venezuela. The public don’t learn from history but instead are constantly being manipulated — the public are constantly gullible. A gangster-led nation hires professionals to fool them, constantly. This is serious business, not for amateurs.