the burbank digest

Aug. 21, 1959 President Eisenhower advances U.S. white supremacist manifest destiny with executive order transforming the brutal occupation and annexation of Hawaii into U.S. 'statehood'

U.S. Mercenary Chickens Will Come Home to Roost
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&...
"The specter of mercenary occupation of American cities is no longer farfetched - it has already happened."
The wholesale privatization of U.S. war-making capabilities continues apace, despite the expected indictment of six Blackwater mercenaries involved in last year's massacre of Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad traffic jam. Domestically, for-profit prisons are popping up like Wal-Mart superstores, while Katrina brought soldiers of fortune to the streets of a major American city. "As the current corrupt order decays, the rulers find that due process and other niceties of law - including armies operating under codes of military justice and civil service police forces - restrict their freedo
Mercenaries are now an entrenched, institutional factor in U.S. global and domestic "security" strategies....

Ordinary people in the United States have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's Al Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba, it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the most powerful nation in the world - with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its history of having waged and sponsored endless wars, and the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear bombs - is peopled by a terrified citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear. This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for further acts of aggression.
Arundhati Roy

news not fit for primetime...
Nepal Elects Maoist to Be Prime Minister
August 16, 2008
Maoist leader’s victory opens the way to the establishment of a democratic government in Nepal. The Maoist leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal — who goes by the nom de guerre Prachanda, “the fierce one” in Nepali — won more than two-thirds of 577 votes cast in the Constituent Assembly on Friday evening. The Maoists remain on the United States’ list of banned terrorist organizations, although American officials have established contact with their political leaders, including Prachanda. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/world/asia/16nepal.html?_r=1&em&oref=l...

"Hawaiian activists have long used the site for protests against the U.S. occupation of the islands."
Hawaiian palace occupied anew; about 20 arrested
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/printer2/index.asp?ploc=t&refer=http://sea...

"Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people ...Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century."
GWB 8/11/8

1,252,595 Iraqis Slaughtered Since U.S. Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html

"Russian Aggression Must Not Go Unanswered"
VP Dick Cheney
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20491.htm

The War in Georgia Is a War for the West
By MIKHEIL SAAKASHVILI
President of Georgia
Why this war? This is the question my people are asking. This war is not of Georgia's making, nor is it Georgia's choice.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20490.htm

"...if you were to rate how serious the strategic situations have been in the past few years, this would be above Iraq, this would be above Afghanistan, and this would be above Iran."
Colonel Gardiner, retired Air Force colonel and strategy and military operations teacher: the National War, Air War, and Naval War Colleges.

Massive US Naval Armada Heads for Iran:
The build up of naval forces in the Gulf will be one of the largest multi-national naval armadas since the First and Second Gulf Wars. The intent is to create a US/EU naval blockade (which is an Act of War under international law) around Iran
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/35448

OR WAS IT CALCULATED? A PRETEXT TO MOVE AGAINST AND ISOLATE RUSSIA, SIMULTANEOUSLY PLAYING A CHINA CARD, TO DIVIDE & WEAKEN ITS MAJOR RIVALS?
Washington Risks Nuclear War by Miscalculation
By F William Engdahl
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article5834.html

digest note:
Facing defeat and decline, U.S. direct war moves against its two major rivals, against Russia under the shadow of the Olympics and against China, are desperate escalations in its world war for global supremacy, bringing the world closer to all-out nuclear war. For the U.S. to dare to castigate Russia for 'violating its integrity by invading and occupying Georgia', is so far beyond nazi big lies as to almost defy belief, even from modern history's #1 state terrorist empire.
The strategically weak tyrant must try repackaging itself with in 'kinder, gentler' image in hopes of salvaging its hegemonic global goal: you'll find some of this new-branding propaganda below. Current U.S. military maneuvers across the world may tend to dull its effects on its intended audiences in the 'homeland' and other western imperialist 'international community' ... the only places they have captive audiences.
U.S. tactics against Russia & China demonstrate how such intensified chaos and destruction worldwide is the product of the marriage of 'hard' and 'soft power' tactics, together indispensable weapons in its geostrategic arsenal, capable of unprecedented destruction, incapable of eliminating the rivals and resistance that proves, as Mao said, U.S. imperialism is ultimately a paper tiger ... when we say enough.

Cheney issues warning to Russia
11 Aug 2008 U.S. Vice President [sic] Dick Cheney said Russia faces serious consequences with the United States and its allies if it continues attacks against Georgia. A Cheney spokeswoman said the vice president told Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili that Russia's actions "must not go unanswered," CNN reported Monday.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/08/11/Cheney_issues_warning_to_Russia/U...

BACKGROUND:

New World Order Playground. Georgia 2005
US approved "democracy" in the wake of U.S. sponsored " Rose Revolution"

Digest note:

First in this digest issue, some samples of the relentless, vicious China-bashing, followed by relevant U.S. geostrategic docs. putting these psyops in geostrategic perspective, then China's analysis of U.S. Human Rights [HR] based on 2007 U.S. Mayors Conference, and finally, the digest hosts let's play-HR -game: what would U.S. headlines be for selected news articles if they were about China?

Revolutionary socialist China was u.s. #1 enemy. Since China's overthrow of socialism and its grossly successful restoration of capitalism, with u.s. assistance, it is again the major rival/threat to U.S. global hegemony, thus enemy #1 because it violates the world dictator's doctrine * 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival', NYT March 8, 1992,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE1D7173AF93BA35750C0A...

The digest's political position and purpose:
China's capitalist success, like all capitalist wealth, is wrung from those it exploits and oppresses, but still in its relative infancy compared to world dominant U.S.: the digest supports genuine Chinese anti-capitalist struggle, but not U.S. sponsored 'democracy dissidents'. Because the world's, and our own main enemy ihere n the "homeland", is u.s. imperialist-zionism, the digest main job is exposing and promoting resistance to the profoundly racist state terror, hypocrisy and propaganda of amerikan "globalized capitalism". 'Hard' and 'soft' power U.S.-israel intervention anywhere in the world is deadly, and for one purpose: to increase its finance capitalist global dictatorship.

The 1992 Pentagon's Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival' clearly spelling out the U.S. global agenda, was published by the NYT. Today the NYT and entire capitalist media plays dumb, pretending it knows nothing but the state propaganda it doles out as news. Counting on the stupidity and apathy of a public it has helped condition, it can contradict itself in the service of imperialist 'national security' with no repercussions.

The U.S. is in deep trouble -- politically, economically and militarily, big and small capitalist rivals are uniting against its devastating domination, exposing the global dictator whose "homeland" is also in a state of collapse.

To salvage u.s. hegemony, the world's most violent power must adjust its tactics in a desperate attempt to achieve its geostrategic goal spelled out in the following document:

from the Pentagon's Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival'
http://www.princeton.edu/~ppn/docfiles/pentagon_1992.html
NYT March 8, 1992
This Defense Planning guidance addresses the fundamentally new situation created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the internal as well as the external empire, and the discrediting of Communism as an ideology with global pretensions and influence. The new international environment has also been shaped by the victory of the United States and its coalition allies over Iraqi aggression -- the first post-cold-war conflict and a defining event in U.S. global leadership. In addition to these two victories, there has been a less visible one, the integration of Germany and Japan into a U.S.-led system of collective security and the creation of a democratic "zone of peace."

"QUELLING VIOLENCE" BY STATE TERRORIST GENOCIDE & PSYWARFARE ...OR ARMED ANTI-IMPERIALIST RESISTANCE
"Sure, there's less violence... because we've ethnically cleansed most of Baghdad."
Congressman Jim Moran
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=39456

"We first fought heathens in the name of religion, then communism, now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change"
Serj Tankian

digest note:
the excuses and enemies change, the faces change, but never the bipartisan u.s. capitalist ruling class, its 'manifest destiny' agenda and the unspeakable crimes of the barbaric perpetrators, their pimps, proxies and apologists.

“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
September 2000, Rebuilding America’s Defenses

the heroic 'militants' and 'insurgents' fighting a just war against u.s. state terror, blamed for the 'violence'

"The 'civilized' have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the 'civilized' world. "
James Baldwin [From chapter 1 of "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976), page 489 of Collected Essays

"If war aims are stated which seem to be solely concerned with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. The interests of other peoples should be stressed. This would have a better propaganda effect."
Private memo from The Council of Foreign Relations to the US State Department, 1941

“All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”
Richard Perle

"the centerpiece for the CENTCOM Master Plan for future access to and operations in Central Asia."
Admiral William J. Fallon, then the commander of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) seeking funds in 2007 for $62 million ammunition storage facility at Bagram Air Base

CENTCOM's Master Plan and U.S. Global Hegemony
By Robert Higgs

"War is a continuation of politics by other means."
von Clausewitz

"When a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refuse to defend it--at that moment you begin to die... I have never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice."
Mumia Abu Jamal

"The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.”
Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law.

DISPELLING ILLUSIONS of 'CHANGE' THE WORLD CANNOT AFFORD
A Cast of 300 Leading Imperialist Terrorists Advises Obama on Foreign Policy
Barack Obama's huge foreign policy team, organized like a mini State Department, is on the spot as the senator plans his overseas trip.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/us/politics/18advisers.html?th&emc=th

1,236,604 Iraqis Slaughtered Since The U.S. Invaded Iraq
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html

"We will welcome the Americans to Iraq. Unfortunately, we ran out of candy so we will have to substitute bullets."
Tariq Aziz

FALLUJA RESISTANCE RISES AGAIN DESPITE U.S. PAID DEATH SQUAD "AWAKENING GROUPS"
The city of Falluja has been placed under tight curfew as U.S. and Iraqi troops are said to be gearing for a new offensive.

Digest overview:
From many angles we hear the U.S. war described as a "war for oil". Left variations of this slimey obfuscation blame 'the war on Iraq' on: the current administration, emphasis on Bush/Cheney connections to 'big oil'; domestic consumption; "peak oil", diminishing production levels and resources; 'supply and demand' problem caused by OPEC, Nigeria, China and 'population growth' in 'third world'. Pretending Bush is the root of the crisis, a fascist rabble-rousing figurehead selected by the ruling class, not the capitalist-imperialist system.

Why scrupulously bury the truth?
Blaming Bush for birthing 'failed' wars, collapsing economy, 'violating traditional american principles' with a militaristic "manifest destiny" agenda is not just a sick joke it is calculated ahistorical political sleight of hand, easy-sell psywar. U.S. 'left' means neoliberal democrats and all who oppose Bush. The fact that millions of left-liberals buy this "opposition" garbage is testament to the depths of white supremacist class privilege, and profoundly narcissistic ignorance. The disingenuous and deadly obfuscation is necessary to maintain even a threadbare illusion of democracy and ward off a serious 'crisis of confidence' in the whole system. If people understand that the ruling class is bipartisan, its electoral agents job is enforcing everything rotten, electoral garnish change pacification won't work. So behind the scenes, throngs of foundations, think-tanks and NGOs, neoliberal and neocon, supported by the state, strategize, analyze, produce policy for politicians to implement, fund 'foreign aid 'orgs. and initiatives, mobilize activists to implement imperialist plans and create 'news' that wins public opinion to support this brutal system in humanitarian drag. [Digest readers know how this vicious deception works and can see earlier issues for reminders.]

Where does oil fit into the big picture?