Now Point on the Doll Where Uncle Sam Touched You.

So as expected, the arrival of President Obama was coupled with an announcement by Julia Gillard of an increased US Military presence in Australia. A build up of Marines and USAF will give the US greater access to our defence facilities, greater co-operation, training exercises and all that jazz in an attempt to reinvigorate the US-Alliance. It's marks the 60th anniversary of a relationship that began when a young attractive nation sought the security of a powerful protector after realising her ageing British parents couldn't protect her if agrarian peasants communists from Asia invaded to rape, pillage and put us into Gulag's.

The US-Alliance is the bedrock of Australian foreign & national security policy. In the eyes of the establishment it is far too important to be left to minor political players like the Greens and they "don't direct foreign policy" as KRudd said. The fact is, foreign policy decisions rarely require the consent of Cabinet or Parliament and is highly concentrated in the hands of the Executive a number of powerful government bureaucrats from the defence & intelligence community who together form the National Security Committee.

It is no secret America wants to make Australia its base for containing Chinese expansion and retain its hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region. Sure a few more training exercises & 2500 US Marines stationed in the Northern Territory will entail an increase in sexual misconduct but strategically, it doesn't change shit. The fact is that in the event of a war between the US & China Australia is already a nuclear target with Pine Gap & North-West Cape being the first two (China has the capability to shoot satellites out of orbit so that might remove the need to nuke Pine Gap).

Still, it is no empty gesture, its a move calculated to send a clear message to Beijing, that despite the fact US is going bankrupt they still intend to police have a presence in the region to maintain the Pax Americana. As a cynic, I don't buy this shit about a new paradigm humanitarian for intervention, Libya was a resource grab under the guise of humanitarian intervention. But maybe I'm wrong and the US will intervene in West Papua when the TNI go and shoot up some villagers with American weapons because they want independence and the mine at Grasberg that pumps mine tailings into the river shut down (considering its owned by a company with links to Henry Kissinger, I won't hold my breath).

This, the week after the APEC summit where the latest announcement regarding the Trans Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) where the US sent a clear and unambiguous diplomatic "fuck you" to the PRC by leaving them out of the talks designed to counter their growing economic influence in ASEAN.

It's common knowledge that US lawmakers are pissed at the Chinese for artificially devaluing their currency, giving their exports an advantage over foreign competitors. Still, it's not like the PRC is doing what the US has done over the last 40 years by devaluing its currency to use it as an economic weapon to fuck over smaller and weaker nations. Some in Congress are calling to impose duties on Chinese imports to "send a message to Beijing that Congress will do whatever it takes to protect American jobs." Yeah, it took me a while to stop laughing about that one too, I mean hasn't neo-liberal doctrine been sending jobs to China for the last 25 years?

But as Machiavelli said nations are not like people; they mate for convenience and not love. And so the corporate oligarchy that has captured the US government saw a great opportunity in the 80's to send jobs to Asia, specifically China allowing for wholesale deindustrialisation of the US economy and destruction of the unions. While they made massive profits in the short term, the offshoring of production weakened the nation as a whole and now that the Chinese have managed to hack into virtually all the systems of US Defence contractors and steal a fuckton of intellectual property and technology, I'll have $500 on China winning any potential war that doesn't resort to nukes. Besides, they don't need to start a real war, they can sit back and watch the Americans destroy themselves.

The US has locked down the life blood of the global economy in the middle east, controlling what goes in and out of the Persian Gulf and trying to secure oil pipelines from central Asia. Now with the war drum beating for Iran to secure the remaining oil reserves and prevent them selling to China, the new Cold-War is here. The fact is kids, this is a Manichean struggle for the remaining resources, manifesting in proxy resource wars like Afghanistan, Iraq & Libya.

So lets have a look at what those elites have delivered for Australia under the US alliance to see where it might take us...

The US-Australia alliance provided us with Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan & Iraq, of which Vietnam & Iraq were sold on false pretense and Australian involvement was calculated to simply please their class counterparts and the alliance, providing the US with diplomatic support in the face of eroding moral legitimacy engendered by decades of imperialism and unilateralism.

While the easily misled apparatchiks from the Young Liberals who aspire to be the next generation of Australian conservative scum will claim that as a result of the alliance, we have not been invaded by agrarian peasants communists, they fail to realise that our lack of independence and sycophancy towards the US has posited Australia as an accomplice to American imperialism in the Muslim world & Asia. Like Keating says, we need to find our security in Asia, not from Asia. This latest announcement doesn't bode well for future relations with our biggest trading partner,  not to mention Indonesia who is a bit pissed off because they think it will lead to mistrust in the region (LOL).

In truth, Australia's dependence on powerful friends opened the door for foreign political influence that allowed a small number elites to get rich by selling off the farm, securing their own power while limiting the potential for radical domestic reform. The fact is that Australia is a sophisticated vassal state that serves as a strategic outpost for the military, economic and political interests of the US. Sure we have control over some areas of policy (like mining LOL) but as the Whitlam government learned, any policy that threatened the primacy of American interests would not be allowed, from "buying back the farm", to Jim Cairns' views on Vietnam or jeopardising the future of American satellite bases.

After the US displaced Britain as the global hegemon, Uncle Sam found in Australia, a young and attractive nation that he was able to groom, influence and ultimately use for his own sordid desires.

I laughed when I heard Obama make reference to China & human rights. I mean look at it from the Chinese perspective. America, who over the last 50 years has done nothing for the cause of human rights but deny them, overthrowing governments around the world and installing oppressive military dictators like Suharto, Pinochet, the Shah, Saddam, Mubarak and co. to maintain their global hegemony. If I were the Chinese, I would like to know where they get the audacity.

The Chinese are confident on the world stage now. They're not going to take the shit they did in the Opium Wars or when the US was messing with their politics to prevent Mao coming to power.

Apparently when the Chinese don't like you, they say "may you live in interesting times". Indeed we are.

Remembrance Day: 36 Years On

Today Australian's remember the sacrifice that thousands of our brave young ancestors made on the battlefield, in the senseless conflicts that have scarred cultures and scorched continents since World War 1. 

But today, the 11/11/2011 is also the anniversary of another event that was equal in it's effect on our nation. It marks the day a nation lost it's innocence, when Australian democracy was subverted by a coup detat orchestrated by the CIA that deposed a popularly elected Prime Minister named Edward Gough Whitlam. 

Whitlam had many critics but many more admirers and his governments record of reform is a savage indictment on the current state of paralysis our democracy is in. As the ABC's Jonathan Green wrote earlier in the year: 

"It was, after all, the Whitlam government ended conscription and withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam, implemented equal pay for women, launched an inquiry into education and funded government and non-government schools on a needs basis, established a separate ministry responsible for Aboriginal affairs, established the single department of defence, withdrew support for South Africa, granted independence to Papua-New Guinea, abolished tertiary education fees and established the Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme, increased pensions, established Medibank, established controls on foreign ownership of Australian resources, passed the Family Law Act establishing no-fault divorce, passed a series of laws banning racial and sexual discrimination, extended maternity leave and benefits for single mothers, sought to democratise the electoral system by introducing one-vote-one-value, implemented wide-ranging reforms of the Labor Party's organisation, initiated Australia's first federal legislation on human rights the environment and heritage, established the Legal Aid Office, established the National Film and Television School, launched construction of National Gallery of Australia, established the Australian Development Assistance Agency, reopened the Australian Embassy in Peking after 24 years, established the Prices Justification Tribunal, revalued the dollar, cut tariffs across the board, established the Trade Practices Commission, established the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service, established the Law Reform Commission, established the Australian Film Commission, established the Australia Council, established the Australian Heritage Commission, established the Consumer Affairs Commission, established the Technical and Further Education Commission, implemented a national employment and training program, created Telecom and Australia Post to replace the Postmaster-General's Department, devised the Order of Australia to replace the British Honours system, abolished appeals to the Privy Council, changed the national anthem to Advance Australia Fair and instituted Aboriginal land rights."

Whitlam's socialist version of democracy did not appeal to the masters in Washington at the time, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and arguably two of the most corrupt, evil human beings to have walked the corridors of a Western "democracy" in the last 100 years. 

But what incurred the wrath of Kissinger and Nixon wasn't just Whitlam's socialist agenda or his desire to reclaim Australia's vast natural resources and manufacturing sectors from foreign ownership, or the fact he sacked the head of ASIO & ASIS, but the attention he was drawing to the renewal of the lease for the Pine Gap defence facility and giving the impression that his government would not renew them. Former CIA station chief James Jesus Angleton referred to Pine Gap as the "jewel in the counter-intelligence crown". Whitlam also publicly outed Country Party MP Doug Anthony for receiving CIA money and on the 11/11/75 a parliamentary debate was scheduled regarding those facilities. 

You can watch an old Channel 10 show on YouTube here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JQ7-xvgcHA and the second part http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prV-Yae_5_g.

Distinguished conservative intellectual Owen Harries argued in the ABC Boyer lectures several years ago: "For extended periods of time in Washington, one needs very good peripheral vision to see Australia on the world map.''

Now it seems, that isn't the case. Washington has shown an increasing interest in with announcements to increase spending on their established Australian bases, particularly in Exmouth, Western Australia, which is home to a vital communications system that services the US submarine fleet. By virtue of that fact, it makes it Australia's #2 nuclear target, behind Pine Gap in Alice Springs. 

A communications centre is being built in Geraldton and an Air Base in the Northern Territory. Yes that's the reason President Teleprompter Obama is going to Darwin, he's just out inspecting how the global militarisation is coming along for the Pax Americana and making sure that when everyone thinks of the US, they think of his pearly whites and not decades of imperialism and war. It's PR for international relations. 

The agenda for President Obama's visit is set to be the "next phase of the alliance" referring to the ANZUS Alliance that has been the bedrock of Australian foreign policy since 1951. 

"The next phase of the alliance" is diplomatic speak for 'we are making your country our base for containing Chinese expansion in the region'. But we shouldn't feel special in the region because we're white, Obama recently visited Indonesia to strengthen diplomatic ties, which resulted in an arms deal (just for old times sake) & closer US ties with the Indonesian spy agency Kopassus to contain Chinese influence in the region. 

The US & China are in a business relationship that is going bad and an economic cold war is taking place for strategic control of the world's remaining reserves of strategic resources. As our infinite growth economic paradigm collides with finite resources and the laws of nature, the 21st century is going to be a series of proxy resource wars extending all the way to your local IGA when you're fighting your neighbour for the last tin of Sardines (because that's what I'll be going for when the shit gets real). 

So predictably, Julia Gillard & Tony Abbott will stand there and have their photos taken shaking President Obama's hand and pretend to talk about the next stage of the alliance in front of the cameras and journalists who are allowed into the press gallery because they won't ask any embarrassing questions. "President Obama, you said you'd close Guantanamo but then you sent more troops to Afghanistan and got rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. Don't you think that's like giving the Father of the Year Award to Josef Fritzl?"

Yeah, yeah he is bringing the troops home from Iraq I hear you say but he fails to mention the thousands of contract workers staying there for Halliburton, Bechtel and private security firms to protect US interests. It's also sobering to remember that the US still has troops in Germany, Japan, Philippines & Samoa. The US government is a bit like AIDS; once you've been infected, bar some radical advancement, you have it for life and while in the West it can be treated to prolong a patients life and reduce the agony, eventually it will kill you. 

I wonder if Obama has trouble keeping a straight face with the shit the corporate oligarchy makes him say when they've just killed some Arab guy who didn't like America's schtick? The Gaddafi thing, I mean he was there talking about the youth in Libya rising up against oppression and tyranny, demanding liberty, freedom and democracy and all that shit the Iraqi's got, while in the background the Occupy protestors were getting beaten, maced and shot in the head with tear gas canisters for peacefully protesting. The level of hypocrisy is nothing short of breathtaking and if you can't see how much of a fraud Obama is, how evil the US Government is at the highest levels, how the Republic has been destroyed, then it's either because you're stupid or because you would prefer to enact a defence mechanism and be wilfully blind as to the state of play. 


The fact is, the prevailing realist view of foreign policy sees our future security provided by Washington and is fearful of the rise of China and failing some radical change in the current circumstances we will continue to be the 51st state of America. 

But I've digressed, sorry Gough. 

In 1982 Ray Martin interviewed Christopher Boyce in a maximum security prison in the US. Most Australian's would have never of heard of him but he was responsible for perhaps the biggest act of espionage in the last century. He was stationed in Australia as a CIA employee in one of their front companies for analysing intelligence. 

Here is the transcript of the interview.  http://www.serendipity.li/cia/cia_oz/60min.htm

It provides an insight into his motivations and contains some absolutely startling revelations.

Anyway, I've procrastinated long enough on this, happy reading my fellow hominids.  

**For further reading on the Whitlam saga go here: http://newdawnmagazine.com.au/articles/20%20Years%20of%20Cover-Up1.html

Iran: Iraq 2.0?

So I'm sitting at my desk 5 days before an exam thinking what an interesting place the world is right now and how much I wish everyone would take psilocybin mushrooms. It's like some fucked up futuristic political thriller co-written by Orwell & Huxley. 

Sovereign debt crises, wars, famines, natural disasters, environmental rape and of course how could I forget the media hype about Kim Kartrashian's marriage to some fuckwit who was dumb enough to put a ring on her finger instead of a finger in her ring.

But what really interests me aside from who Warney bangs is this Iran brouhaha. After Gaddafi got a dagger in the sphincter, for his overtures to China & Russia killing his own people he was displayed in the frozen section of the Libyan supermarket and Iran was firmly back on the agenda. Last week the US made allegations of an assassination plot hatched by the Iranian's to kill a Saudi Ambassador on US sovereign land, which if true is an act of war and if it is false a pretext for war. I guess we shouldn't hold our breaths for compelling evidence, considering the US hasn't provided any evidence to show Bin Laden was involved in 9/11. The Iranian's have categorically denied such a plot and demanded an apology but something tells me they won't get one and if they do, it'll be in the form of air strikes. In a country that boasts a literacy rate of 70%, I find it hard to believe they'd be so stupid, especially considering they were allegedly trying to use a Mexican cartel as proxy. Nonetheless "all options are on the table." Except the peaceful ones.

Then this week, the I.A.E.A. is to deliver a report to the United Nations on Iran's nuclear program, detailing how they are close to getting enough fissionable material for a warhead and the capability to use one. This has been with information gathered from intelligence agencies around the world. Oh that puts me at ease, knowing that the same intelligence agencies who manipulated intelligence demonstrating Iraq had WMD's are still percussionists in the war drum orchestra that is the Western oligarchy. This is reminiscent of the procedures that preceded the invasion of Iraq because of Sadaam's intention to price his oil in Euro's when the sanctions lifted nuclear program that was mysteriously never found. But it's ok, Sadaam is dead and the Iraqi's have a democracy and a McDonalds. Ask Michael Ware what he thinks about that.

As a political realist, I can empathise with the Iranian's for wanting to get themselves a few nukes. I mean being labelled part of an "axis of evil" and surrounded by US military bases, who wouldn't want that deterrent? It's not like the US has a history of overthrowing governments and installing a despot like the Shah so Western oil interests are safe.

"Oh but *****, you can't have religious extremists in possession of nuclear weapons!" Unless of course, you're talking about Israel where zealots with American weaponry is par for the course.. but that's not to say I don't agree with the proposition that religious crazies shouldn't have WMD's. But maybe the threat of mutually assured destruction will bring the parties to the table and see a peaceful resolution? LOL. Iranian President Ahmadinejad has reportedly said he "will wipe Israel off the map", which is pretty much what the Israeli's are doing to the Palestinians. It's that whole "eye for an eye" bollocks.  

Coincidentally, Iran also happens to be sitting on the world's 4th largest oil & gas reserves, something the Chinese are hungry to get their hands on to fuel their incredible economic growth. They are also in talks to have a gas pipeline running to India and by virtue of their energy reserves alone, are a potential regional superpower with an educated population of 78 million. Former CIA officer Robert Baer has written extensively on an Iranian superpower and what that means for US hegemony. This brings us to the juiciest part of this game of international energy chess, thanks to Wikileaks, we know the Saudi's want the American's to strike Iran. They don't like each other, as the Saudi's comprise the Sunni sect of Islam and the Iranian's the Shiite sect and they have a long history of not getting along. But it may very well be a case of who hits the Iranian nuclear facilities first; Israel or the US?

The Israeli's are worried about what a nuclear Iran will mean for their dominance in the region and the war crimes they're currently committing in the form of settlements in the West Bank. The Americans are jizzing at the prospect of controlling the worlds 4th largest oil reserve and containing Chinese influence, forgetting what a clusterfuck Iraq turned out to be. Israel may very well strike Iran without Washington's approval, something that deeply worries the US, as trigger happy Jews might drag the US into another conflict in the Middle-East, something that they can ill afford at this point in time. But hey, when your currency is backed by oil and you can just print more money whenever you need, who cares about the cost?

Israel will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, just like they wouldn't tolerate a nuclear Iraq in 1981 or a nuclear Syria in 2007. They see Iran as a threat to their very existence. Israel's PM Binyamin Netanyahu said "the year is 1938 and Iran is Germany." I got news for you pal, after the Germans got levelled, the only nation I know of invading others land and claiming to be a master race was Israel. It's an incredible irony that those who suffered the worst at the hands of racial supremacy, are now its most fervent advocates. The oppressed become oppressors.

For Israel, this marks the biggest decision since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. There are rumours of a consensus among Israel's security elite about a pre-emptive strike on Iran and if that's the case, they'd better do it properly, because if they do, the Shiite will hit the fan and start a real big bonfire. If Iran was hit, they will retaliate and hit a Saudi oil installation, maybe attack some oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and drop a bucket load of sea mines, not to mention send some rockets into Tel Aviv. That would send the price of oil to $10/L and make the oil crisis of the 1970's seem like child's play, crash every western economy and draw the whole world into this bullshit conflict. 

I just hope the coverage is good, there are journo's there like Michael Ware and Al Jazeera's compound doesn't get bombed. Again.