{"id":41446,"date":"2018-12-08T09:29:57","date_gmt":"2018-12-08T14:29:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41446"},"modified":"2018-12-09T13:23:02","modified_gmt":"2018-12-09T18:23:02","slug":"the-donald-undone-tilting-at-the-swamp-succumbing-to-the-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41446","title":{"rendered":"The Donald Undone: Tilting At The Swamp, Succumbing To The Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Donald Undone: Tilting At The Swamp, Succumbing To The Empire<\/a><\/h3>\n
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You can’t build the Empire and drain the Swamp at the same time. That’s because the Swamp is largely the fruit of Empire. And it’s also the reason that the Donald is being rapidly undone.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it\u00a0is the Empire’s $800 billion<\/strong> <\/em>national security budget which\u00a0feeds Washington’s\u00a0vast complex of weapons\u00a0suppliers, intelligence contractors, national security bureaucrats, NGOs, think tanks, K-street lobbies, so-called “law” firms and all-purpose racketeers. It’s what accounts for the Imperial City’s unseemly and ill-gotten prosperity.<\/p>\n

It goes without saying that the number one priority of these denizens\u00a0of Empire is to keep the gravy train rolling. That is accomplished by\u00a0inventing and exaggerating threats to America’s homeland security and by\u00a0formulating\u00a0far-flung and misbegotten missions designed to extend and reinforce Washington’s global hegemony.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0we demonstrate elsewhere, a\u00a0true homeland security defense budget would consist of the strategic nuclear triad and modest conventional forces to defend the nation’s\u00a0shoreline and air space; it would cost about $250 billion<\/strong><\/em> per year plus a few $10 billion more for a State Department which minded its own business.<\/p>\n

So the $500 billion<\/strong> <\/em>difference is the\u00a0fiscal cost of Empire, which\u00a0is\u00a0pushing the US toward an immense\u00a0generational fiscal crisis. But\u00a0it’s also a measure of the\u00a0giant larder\u00a0that fills the Swamp with the projects and busywork of Washington’s global hegemony.<\/p>\n

In fact, it is the vasty deep of that $500 billion larder\u00a0which gives rise to the forces that not\u00a0only thwart the Donald’s desire to drain the Swamp, but actually enlist him the\u00a0cause of deepening its brackish\u00a0waters.<\/p>\n

Moreover, these missions encompass far more than direct military occupations, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq; or\u00a0indirect aggressions, such as in Washington’s arming of anti-government terrorists in Syria and\u00a0facilitating and supplying Saudi Arabia’s genocidal bombing campaign in Yemen…<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Donald Undone: Tilting At The Swamp, Succumbing To The Empire You can’t build the Empire and drain the Swamp at the same time. That’s because the Swamp is largely the fruit of Empire. And it’s also the reason that the Donald is being rapidly undone. Indeed, it\u00a0is the Empire’s $800 billion national security budget […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3598,2120,7844,259,16769,3142,865],"class_list":["post-41446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-contra-corner","tag-david-stockman","tag-donald-trump","tag-empire","tag-swamp","tag-us-empire","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41448,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41446\/revisions\/41448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}