The New York Times (NYT) is a trusted source of Administration thinking, particularly in foreign policy, more, an uncanny, sensitive barometer of deep-lying structural-military-diplomatic events which are presently culminating, beyond the New Cold War brewing since Clinton’s international posture in Europe and the Pacific, in the actuality of heated confrontation directed against both Russia and China. Under Obama, the page has turned. No longer can we pretend a chess match in which tough rhetoric and vast expenditures form a comfortable (and highly profitable) surrogate for open warfare, a stage of inner discipline favorable to the suppression of dissent, the creation of industrial-financial-commercial fortunes, and the habituation to violence (transmissible in spirit and acquiescence from urban settings to foreign interventions). Now is different. Capitalism in America has reached the point of definitive sclerosis, a terminal, pathological hardening of the ideological arteries, in which the overgrowth of the fibrous/ interstitial tissue of profit-madness, hubris, and conquest for its own sake, has won out, has defeated whatever has been left of the Constitutional rights of the American formative context. We are a long way from the late 18th century, and with brief exceptions, notably, those brought on by the struggles of the exploited and the persecuted themselves, the progression has been downhill all the way, coinciding with the falsification of government’s public trust and the concentration of private wealth and power.
So what is happening now is not surprising. Upper groups, in their narcissistic death wish, want it all, the entire globe at their feet—and sensing ultimate defeat are prepared to bring the curtain down. How else explain the rash of mediocrities scurrying for the presidential nomination in 2016 and receiving support from vested wealth, the latter secure in the knowledge there will be no deviation from the quest for eternal hegemony or bust in trying? How else the glib, unctuous response to climate change, or to drone murder, or to ever more dangerous brinkmanship, confident the show must and will go on—or else!—to the benefit of ruling groups? Here we owe NYT a debt of gratitude for displaying America as it really is, in power-wielding, policy-making circles.
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I have in mind Peter Baker and Steven Erlanger’s article, “Russia Wields Aid and Ideology Against West to Fight Sanctions” (June 8), which conjures up a Russian threat to Europe under Putin’s megalomaniac unscrupulous direction. The occasion for the article, and Obama’s G7 meetings over the weekend is to ensure united EU approval for Russian sanctions over Ukraine, due to expire at the end of June. Obama is unquestionably the principal arm-twister, cheerleader, war monger here, using Ukraine as the symbol of Russian aggression when it was his own cabal of hawks who engineered the coup d’etat overthrowing the legitimate government and thus bringing to power one that was compliant with US-EU-NATO policy and wishes menacing Russia’s borders. Yet the NYT article refers to Putin’s “subterranean—and sometimes overt—efforts” to destabilize Europe through “win[ning] allies in the West.”