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Friday, April 30, 2021

US TROOP BUILD UP THREATENS RESOURCE WAR IN THE ARCTIC

By Sam Carliner, Left Voice.

April 28, 2021

https://popularresistance.org/us-troop-build-up-threatens-resource-war-in-the-arctic/

The U.S. Military Has Announced Its Intention To Expand Its Presence In The Arctic.

This perfectly highlights why the fight against climate change must be anti-imperialist.

While plenty of headlines are being dedicated to the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, an increase of U.S. forces in another area has gone under the radar. This area is the Arctic.

Back in March, the U.S. Army announced its strategy for “Regaining Arctic Dominance,” signaling that the region long devastated by climate change may soon also be devastated by great power competition and U.S. imperialism.

This focus on the Arctic comes as a result of the climate crisis. The Arctic is melting three times faster than the rest of the world, but rather than treating this as the existential threat that it is, capitalists view it as an opportunity to expand their regional influence, a move which will fuel the crisis even more.

The announcement by the U.S. Army makes clear that a focus on great power competition is driving the focus on the Arctic, stating, “Operating in the Arctic allows the Army to powerfully project our forces to enhance our ability to respond in competition, crisis and/or conflict.”

Much of the conflict in question is about access to natural gas in the Arctic that is only now becoming accessible, largely due to the melting of the Arctic, a process that has been fueled by oil extraction in the first place. The majority of known Arctic oil fields are in Russia, placing U.S. capitalists at a disadvantage. Hence the increased military focus to enforce the interests of U.S. capital. The melting of the Arctic also brings new, shorter trade routes into the equation. Russia also has already established its advantaged access to these emerging trade routes, and the Pentagon is already exploring how to build up U.S. naval presence in the Arctic.

The threat of U.S. imperialism in the Arctic cannot be overstated. Imperialism has already been fueling the climate crisis. A 2019 report by Brown University’s Costs of War Project found that the U.S. military is the single biggest polluter in the world aside from whole nation-states. Even when ranked among entire nations, the U.S. military alone produces more carbon emissions than 140 other countries. These numbers are extreme enough without naval ships sailing directly through the melting ice caps.

Unfortunately, the threat of U.S. military expansion in the Arctic has gone largely under-reported. While it is hard to keep tabs on all areas subjected to U.S. imperialism, given that this includes more than 800 foreign bases in more than 70 countries and territories, anti-imperialists should place greater emphasis on this specific expansion given the unique environmental threat it poses.

It is also important to place greater emphasis on the role U.S. imperialism plays in fueling the climate crisis. It is fortunate that young people have made it a point to treat the fight against climate change as a top priority. Still, the role of imperialism has been largely left out of the conversation. The U.S. is openly admitting that it intends to occupy the region of the world most impacted by climate change. If there was ever an opportunity to connect the fight against climate change to the fight against imperialism and capitalism, this is it.

THE CIA HAS BEEN TAKING OVER FOR DECADES

By Lee Camp, Scheer Post.

April 28, 2021

https://popularresistance.org/the-cia-has-been-taking-over-for-decades/

Even Former Presidents Tried To Warn Us.

If you’re looking for proof the CIA and the whole cavalcade of other intelligence agencies working with them have gotten too big, look no further than the DNI’s latest report.

December 22, 1963 — exactly one month after President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, former President Harry S. Truman published an op-ed in the Washington Post that most people, especially our perfumed ruling elite, wanted to ignore.

Truman, who signed the CIA into existence just after World War II, wrote, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—the CIA. […] For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. …There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”

Not only did that adorn the pages of the Washington Post one month after JFK’s death, Truman hand wrote the first draft just one week after JFK met up with a bunch of bullets in Dallas. Sure, one may wish Harry had sent his thoughts to John a month before the President’s televised execution. Maybe he could’ve sent a singing telegram or something. But let’s at least give Truman partial credit for the belated message.

Before his death President Kennedy also held no love for the Central Intelligence Agency. Following the calamitous Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

Point being, clearly Truman, who created the CIA, and Kennedy, who met a mysterious untimely end by professional killers, knew the agency had run amok.

Yet the CIA is still here, bigger and filled with more Bond villains than ever, and now they have a whole cavalcade of other intelligence agencies working with them. The Intelligence Community just recently put out a report that showed that their component agencies are indeed working to surveil, harass, and attack an assortment of U.S. citizens. This particular report from the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was written in consultation with the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the DHS, and a partridge in a pear tree. (An evil, kinda dastardly partridge. Not a good partridge at all. Like the kind of partridge that would eat the last pickle and then put the jar back in the fridge, so that later when you’re excited to grab a delicious crispy pickle, there’s nothin’ there but a jar full of pickle urine. So yeah, the worst partridge.)

The new report stated, “The Intelligence Community assesses that domestic violent extremists who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the U.S. pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.”

Journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote of the report, “It makes clear that its target encompasses a wide range of groups from the left (Antifa, animal rights and environmental activists, pro-choice extremists and anarchists: those who oppose capitalism and all forms of globalization) to those on the right (sovereign citizen movements, anti-abortion activists and those deemed motivated by racial or ethnic hatreds).”

Leave it to our stellar Intelligence Community to group together animal rights activists — who have killed essentially no one ever — with racial hatred extremists — the perpetrators of just about every mass shooting or American terror attack this century. Such a comparison is like saying the 15-year-old who puts a thumb tack on his teacher’s chair is the same as a U.S. military drone aircraft in that they’re both trying to cause harm. Ummm, I think one may cause slightly more harm than the other.

And freeing animals isn’t harm to begin with. What kind of person sees someone release a cow and yells, “Whoa! That’s just like a bomb going off in an elementary school!”

On top of that, the CIA and their wannabes are surveilling and grouping alongside domestic terrorists anyone who points out capitalism causes a lot of problems. Such an analysis is just, well, fact. Capitalism is an economic system requiring infinite growth on a planet with finite resources — so at the end of the day, it can only result in epic collapse. That’s not an opinion. That’s just how it is. (Sidenote: It would be totally cool, FBI, if you could stop watching me through my iPhone camera. …How about at least not when I’m on the toilet? …Please?)

Greenwald said, “To the Department of Homeland Security, an ‘extremist’ is anyone who opposes the current prevailing ruling class and system for distributing power. Anyone they believe is prepared to use violence, intimidation or coercion in pursuit of these causes then becomes a ‘domestic violent extremist,’ subject to a vast array of surveillance, monitoring and other forms of legal restrictions.”

Coercion? Well, shit — I’m willing to use coercion to change our class structure! I think I almost named my TV show Coercion to Bring Down the Class Structure with Lee Camp. I guess that makes me a domestic violent extremist?! How’s this for irony: you could be named a domestic violent extremist for non-violently protesting to end war. That’s like being called an addict for watching too many “Say No To Drugs” commercials.

But the larger point here — which the mainstream media intentionally avoids discussing — is that the CIA is expressly forbidden from operating domestically. It’s not supposed to be in our living rooms. It’s supposed to be in their living rooms! (You can’t see it, but I’m pointing furiously in the other direction, clearly implying the living rooms of other countries. If you were in my living room as I type this, you’d understand. …I don’t know why you’d be here. That would be weird since I don’t know you. But, as long as you’re here, can you take out the trash?)

The only people in Congress voicing concerns about this latest report are ten Republicans, which is pathetic for many reasons, not least of which being that Republicans haven’t gotten anything right since before… ummm… Wow, this is their first time. Good for you guys. Even a blind squirrel finds your nuts sometimes! …Or wait, not your nuts. Someone else’s nuts. …Don’t quote me on that.

Greenwald pointed out how nefarious things are getting. “The Biden administration, along with leading Democrats such as Adam Schiff, have been stating explicitly that one of their top priorities is the adoption of new laws designed to import the Bush/Cheney/Obama War on Terror onto U.S. soil for domestic purposes. As recently as February 14, The Washington Post published an article titled ‘The agency founded because of 9/11 is shifting to face the threat of domestic terrorism.’”

I know it might be easy to read that and think, “Good! They’re going to arrest those damn domestic terrorists.” But — and I can’t stress this enough — we need another “war on terror” about as much as we need a hole in the head, or a venereal disease, or another Sarah Palin. The War on Terror has been an utter disaster for any country on the ass end of it. So why would any American want our own citizens to be on the ass end of the next one?

There’s nothing like bringing overseas disasters back home. While we’re at it, let’s build some Fukushima-style nuclear plants on the coast of California.

Point being, violence is already illegal. Planning to harm people is already illegal. Hence, domestic terrorism is already illegal. The Intelligence Community already has loads of power and money and weapons and people. They don’t need more. They already violate our rights and our privacy and our freedom on a regular basis. They don’t need to do it more.

Remember, fascism will come to America wrapped in an American flag, holding a cross, dressed in a skimpy outfit, cradling a bucket of KFC fried chicken, and giving out free handies. Or, as Greenwald put it, “There are few dangers more acute than the weaponization of these security-state-instruments against U.S. citizens for political ends.”

For generations the Intelligence Community has been a runaway truck — crushing everything in its path, creating coups around the world, killing thousands, and intruding on the lives of average citizens. As I already mentioned, even the president who created the CIA and dropped atomic bombs on people — even that guy felt the CIA was a grave danger to the American experiment. Those concerns started just after he saw a president get whacked live on prime time. I wonder why.