RAINER SHEA—Last week’s BRICS summit provided a clearer sense of who will join in on the war against the U.S. empire, and who will acquiesce to the empire. Brazil, led by the supposedly anti-imperialist Lula, vetoed the entry of Venezuela into BRICS. And fascist India blocked the entry of Pakistan and Turkey, which was less surprising but still a setback. These developments represent a major twist, because there’s evidence that the U.S. color revolution apparatus has intended to target Brazil and India in the past; a report from last summer by the neocon think tank the Eurasia Group listed these countries as among the geopolitical “swing states,” the players that have potential to come into China’s orbit. After the work that Modi and Lula just did to assist in the hybrid war against BRICS, it’s less likely that Washington will try to overthrow them, because they’ve shown themselves to be valuable assets.
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JOHN VAROLI—Trump won’t scale back the empire. He is obsessed with American “greatness”, which means that the U.S. will continue to destabilize the international order, enhancing our status as a pariah nation. (Yes, most of the world hates us). Whoever wins the presidential race, the loser will be the human race.
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PAUL EDWARDS—It’s not complicated. The Empire, like every empire before it, does nothing—absolutely nothing!—for its impotent people. It sucks all the money out of the country, curtails and cripples all opportunity and benefit, contributes nothing to the general welfare (promised in the Constitution), cons and diddles its citizens with idiot “entertainment”, and offers them only reflected glory from the mass murder its War Machine inflicts on the world.
When you have a government that does nothing but cheat its people, and lie to them as if they were defective children; one that does nothing to elevate or support them; one whose chief aim is to exploit their labor and energy and keep them down; one whose whole purpose is to deceive them into idolizing their abusers, and paying for that privilege on their knees, then you have no government at all: you have baldfaced, brutal tyranny.
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EDITOR—Joti Brar demolishes the carefully cultivated myth that bourgeois democracy and periodic elections can possibly improve the lot of the working class, or eventually hand over power to the actual producers instead of the (ever-fewer) billionaires. Topics: History of elections and electioneering in capitalist nations. Joti reviews the record of capitalism as far back as 1820 • Overproduction, the incurable illness of capitalism • Election time circus in the US • The looting of the Soviet Union could not solve global capitalism’s problems • Inexorable impoverishment of the vast majority of humanity under global capitalism. • Constant instability and war.
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ROGER BOYD—You would expect some substance from a person that could be a heart beat away from being president of the United States, but then we have J. D. Vance. He was born in Middletown Ohio in 1984, and he has written that his childhood was one of poverty, abuse and his mother’s drug addiction; being raised mainly by his maternal grandparents. In 2003, after graduating from high school, he joined the US Marine Corp in the non-combat role of military journalist, including six months in Iraq in 2005. Working to all intents and purposes in the public affairs section of the US Marine Corp, Vance would have become experienced in how to put stories together that hide much of the truth and weave stories that humanize what is an elite killing machine.
