The Day Earth Was Murdered

By Paul Craig Roberts

“Change you can believe in” disappeared in the early days of the Obama regime as the same Washington insiders filled the new government’s ranks. David Brooks sung the praises of those who made change impossible: “the best of the Washington insiders, Achievetrons who got double 800s on their SATs.”

Eight years later Donald Trump was specific about the changes he intended, the two most important being normalized relations with Russia and the return home of the middle class jobs and associated state and local tax base that US corporations had moved offshore to foreign locations. But Trump’s government quickly became home to corporate polluters, Wall Street executives, defense contractors, and Russophobic generals.

Obama’s disappointed supporters held firm to their conviction that their man would set the agenda and not the Washington insiders who occupied his government. Trump’s disheartened deplorables are currently finding refuge in this same conviction. But it looks like we will not get the good part from Trump, only the bad part of more pollution and more damage to the social safety net.

Those who agree about this disagree over the explanation. Some insist that Trump, not Hillary, was the establishment’s choice from the beginning and that the fierce opposition to Trump played out in the press and on the airwaves was only an orchestration to convince flyover America that Trump stood for them. My view is different. Trump threatened the power and budget of the military/security complex and the profits of Wall Street before he had an organization and a team in place to impose his agenda. Unlike Michael Corleone, Trump was rash.

Consequently, the CIA, FBI, NSA, Democrats, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the presstitute media boxed Trump in by portraying him in collusion with Russian President Putin to steal the election from Hillary. Marches worldwide were instantly choreographed, and there were constant and escalating accusations portraying Trump and his associates as puppets on Putin’s string. Lists were made of Internet media sites that took exception to Washington’s wars and dangerous provocations of Russia, China, and Iran.

The attack on Trump seems to have succeeded. Trump lost his National Security Adviser who favored normalized relations with Russia. Trump was forced to prove he was not working for Putin by appointing a Russophobe as National Security Adviser. Trump backed off from an early meeting with Putin to reduce the tensions in the relationship caused by the past three US presidents.

The CIA won the fight by creating an atmosphere hostile to any thought that Russia is not a dangerous adversary and the main threat that the US faces. In other words, a preference for reduced tensions between nuclear powers has become evidence that one is a Russian agent or Putin’s dupe.

The CIA’s victory means that the prospect of nuclear Armageddon remains on the table, but the budget of the military/security complex is safe and rising. Is this an acceptable trade-off for you?

I was astonished to see the liberal/progressive/left line up with the CIA against peace and with globalism and Identity Politics against the working class. The liberal/progressive/left has turned against heterosexual white males and transformed the working class from a victim group into alleged victimizers of women, blacks, homosexuals, and Muslim refugees. The American left has degenerated into the Identity Politics that originated with Zionism. (See for example the article by Eric Draitser, the host of CounterPunch Radio,)

The political left, once a force for peace, has transitioned into a force for war, as war is the likely outcome of the high level of tension that now exists between the US and Russia. By helping the CIA handicap President Trump and prevent him from reducing these tensions, the liberal/progressive/left has responsibility for the impending danger.

These tensions are very dangerous. They have resulted in high-readiness nuclear alert postures, which together with short warning times, false signals of incoming missiles and distrust, create a dangerous strategic nuclear situation.

It is reckless for Washington to convince Russia (and China) that the US is preparing a pre-emptive nuclear strike against them. But that is what Washington is doing when it puts anti-ballistic missiles on Russia’s border and tells the Russians the lie that the missiles are there to protect Europe from Iranian ICBMs. The entire world knows that Iran does not have nukes or ICBMs. All Washington’s lie does is to make the purpose of the missiles obvious to the Russians.

The continuous anti-Russian propaganda issuing from Washington, NATO and the despicable Western presstitutes has the purpose of orchestrating a Russian Threat and preventing a reduction of tensions between the nuclear powers. The demonization of Russia’s president and the clearly false charges against Russia, such as interference in the US presidential election, invasion of Ukraine, reconstruction of the Soviet empire—are understood by the Russians as a propaganda campaign to prepare Western populations for a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Russia. The conventional NATO forces conducting military exercises and deployed on Russia’s border are understood by the Russians as being too small and lacking in strength to be of any consequence. They are merely an orchestration to emphasize the Russian Threat for insouciant Western populations. The Russian government understands that all of this is preparation for an attack on Russia. Just as Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi, and Assad were demonized by US government officials, now it is Putin. The dangerous situation could not be more obvious.

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Yet Hillary supporters are completely blind to what is occurring in front of their noses, as is the liberal/progressive/left, the idiot EU governments, and the Western presstitute media. As President Putin himself has stated, “no one listens to us when we point out the impending danger.”

As environmentally damaging as a pipeline can be, it is nothing compared to nuclear war. In the opposition to Trump, emotion has prevailed over reason and hate has prevailed over judgment. The consequences for life on earth will be dire.

Just as the CIA is indifferent to the threat to life on earth that the agency’s orchestration of the Russian Threat presents, and the liberal/progressive/left is too absorbed in hatred of Trump to comprehend that it is enabling the march to nuclear war, the Trump forces are enabling another catastrophic/apocalyptic threat by dismissing global warning as a hoax. That the obvious, observable melting of Arctic ice can be dismissed as a plot against capitalism by left-wing scientists demonstrates a detachment from reality that is difficult to fathom. For whatever reason the ice is melting, the consequence is the sudden enormous release of life-destroying methane into the atmosphere. As far as I am aware, the dire consequences of massive methane release are not controversial.

For a world that sees itself as based on science, it is amazing how uninfluential scientists are. They warn of the consequences of nuclear war, and Western governments continue escalating tensions between nuclear powers. Scientists warn of the consequences of global warming, and the polluting economic interests and their supporters cry “hoax.”

Read Dahr Jamail’s report on the latest published scientific report on the likelihood of a sudden and gigantic release of methane, and then go read the report itself. This is not the fake news that you get from the New York Times, BBC, CNN, Washington Post, Le Monde, MSNBC and the rest of the presstitutes. This report is peer-reviewed scientific opinion based on the known facts at hand.  

What is known among scientists as the Arctic “Methane Time Bomb” has been studied intensely. Scientists believe that a 50-gigaton “burp” of methane could be released in a brief period of time from the melting of the Arctic ice. This would be the sudden addition to the atmosphere of ten times the amount of methane currently in the atmosphere. Scientists equate this to an increase in carbon dioxide of 1,000 gigatons.

In other words, based on our existing scientific knowledge, life on earth depends on the Artic ice not melting. But it is melting.

With the two apocalyptic scenarios described in this article both possibly close at hand, why is the liberal/progressive/left concerned with tranny toilet facilities and the freedom of Muslims to immigrate to Europe and the US? Is this the way they distract themselves from the real threatening issues?

Why are the timber companies cutting down forests and why are the remaining rain forests being massacred when it is trees that absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen?

Why is there intense commercial farming of beef and pork when the methane release from the vast numbers of animals is extraordinary and a factor in the rising temperatures that are melting the Arctic ice?

The answer is that profit-seeking has only short-term motivations, and the profits come mainly from the external costs imposed on third parties and the environment. The effort to control what economists call externalities requires thoughtful and determined regulation. Yet, the Trump administration declares regulation to be a hindrance to business. In other words, regulation interferes with the ability of capitalism to generate profits by externalizing its costs, and, thereby, regulation must be abolished.

We have reached the point where the externalities of economic activity and the externalities of the military/security complex’s need for a Russian threat are on the verge of bringing life on Earth to an end.

The idiocy of Identity Politics is that the ideology has no idea that we are all victims of the real victimizers—the US military/security complex and a carbon-based life style.

Considering the dire circumstances, it really doesn’t matter if more Muslim refugees, whose countries and prospects we have destroyed with our wars of hegemony and who may be seeking revenge for what they have suffered, are admitted to the West. The danger of being run over on a London bridge or at a German bus stop by a Muslim seeking revenge is miniscule compared to thermo-nuclear war and catastrophic changes in the biosphere.

But don’t expect any intelligent awareness from any Western government or from any member of the Western presstitute media. Truth is the last thing that interests these purveyors of fake news. They are interested in manufacturing fake threats, not confronting real ones.

What these hyper-criminals are doing is murdering planet Earth.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.