Why Trump Ordered The Killing Of An Iranian Official: The Real Story Of Economic Warfare We See Everywhere Today

I originally wrote this as a follow-up to the post earlier this year on the unconstitutional murder of an Iranian state official by the Trump administration. I decided not to post it but given now the rising aggressive rhetoric and military belligerence out of Washington, I’m posting it.  Not only does this apply to the ratcheting up of rhetoric and sanctions with Iran, but it also applies to the recent $15 million bounty the U.S. placed on the head of a democratically-elected official in a democratic country, Venezuela. Are Venezuela’s elections a fraud? To be honest, I don’t know. And neither do you. But one thing I do know is that U.S. elections are often rigged to favor certain outcomes such as ensuring the two party system remain unchallenged and the working poor and poor are kept from voting en masse; voter suppression, poll taxes (various modern mechanisms), gerrymandering, political party fraud across multiple areas and on and on.  It has become so obvious that one has to close their eyes not to see the election fraud in our nation.   

The rationale given for the U.S. bounty on Venezuela’s democratically-elected president is an affront to anyone with any degree of sanity, is the claim of Maduro being a drug trafficker.  Can you imagine if Germany or Japan issued a bounty on Obama or Bush for the war crimes they committed?   The U.S. government’s own data shows that the vast majority of drug trafficking in the Americas still comes from Columbia, a U.S. vassal state.  Without specific public data on Maduro, that the U.S. government won’t release or can’t produce because it’s not actually true, there is every reason to believe this is about Venezuela’s oil and minerals which makes it one of the richest countries on earth.  Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in the early 1970s and that is bad news for American corporate empire.  What is even worse news is that Venezuela has limited American involvement in their oil industry in the last decades.  In addition, the recent uptick in Venezuela’s cooperation with Russia and China on energy sales, thus excluding the U.S. petrodollar and threating U.S. dollar hegemony, has likely led to the U.S. ratcheting up aggressive rhetoric against Venezuela. 

One doesn’t have to believe Maduro is a saint to understand the massive corruption and propaganda war the U.S. is waging against Venezuela.  But, I am quite certain that the vast majority, if not all U.S. news regarding Venezuela is false.  It’s interesting to see Venezuela’s grocery stores packed with food on Youtube but people are eating out of dumpsters. Draw your own conclusions but it sounds an awful lot like what we are now seeing in the United States where a ruling elite is crushing the working class.  Grocery stores are full in the U.S. but the lines to food banks are oftentimes miles long.  One should question a lot of what the mainstream news and U.S. government tells you given we are ruled by a pathological class of political and corporate monsters.

The U.S. has ratcheted up sanctions on both Venezuela and Iran recently even after pleas to ease sanctions to allow these countries to import medical supplies.  Even the Europeans, also ruled by pathological corporate-controlled monsters, have broken with the U.S. and have shared medical aid with Iran to help with their pandemic outbreak.  And, the aggressive rhetoric towards China is now reaching a crescendo amongst Republicans. This is the same group of political crooks who led the effort to send millions of our jobs and technology to a communist, authoritarian regime.  As noted on here more than a decade ago, this act is reminiscent of the same American capitalist behavior of funding Adolph Hitler leading into World War II. That funding was both through capitalism itself and direct financial funding of Hitler’s efforts to take power.  

Onto the original post which is as timely as it has ever been.  A few mention of dates have not been updated since January but they are really irrelevant. 

I’d like to make a few comments about Trump’s unconstitutional killing of a government official in Iran. There’s a lot of confusion out there.  The President of the United States did not and does not have the authority to make the decision he did.  Period. There are reports, generally out of conservative media, that bills have been passed that granted him this authority.  There are specific bills that have very narrow and clearly defined powers as it pertains to killing insurgents in Iraq but nothing as it pertains to other sovereign nations.  Since the sham briefing provided to Congress yesterday, Republicans, Independents and Democrats have all said there was no evidence provided to justify this killing.  The executive branch needs to provide its legal justification to Congress in a briefing.  It was clear from everyone in that briefing that no legal justification was provided.  In fact, Republican Trump supporter Mike Lee stated this was the worst briefing in his tenure as a Senator and compared the briefing to that of unchecked power of a king. (CSPAN video with Rand Paul and Mike Lee discussing the unconstitutional nature of this killing here.) Stating that Suleimani was in Iraq and therefore the authorization to take down Saddam Hussein can be used to kill people in Iraq indiscriminately does not qualify as a valid killing any more than an official from France in Iraq being fair game for state-sponsored murder.  And, let’s be clear.  War of every type is state-sponsored murder.  Is war sometimes the lesser of two evils to keep greater lunatics and those controlled by them from harming innocent people?  Yes.  There will always be evil in this world and until we expand our consciousness beyond violence as a means of stopping evil, war is oftentimes the outcome.  But more often than not, these boogeymen are conjured and there are ulterior motives.  Regardless, it’s still murder.  Was Suleimani a terrorist?  Possibly.  But according to whom?  One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.  Regardless, we live in a nation of laws and Trump’s actions were not constitutional.  But Trump appeared to be encouraged by the former head of the CIA, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to do so.  What a surprise. 

What’s the real reason behind the constant belligerence between the U.S. and Iran?  Bad actors on both sides?  Let’s take current politics out of the equation and remind ourselves of some facts discussed on here throughout the years.  I am making no completely informed judgments as to whether Iran or the U.S. is to blame for tensions.  But let’s look for some type of root cause analysis here. 

Iran was the first constitutional democracy in the Middle East approximately 100 years ago.  It was a very modern, western-leaning, temperate society.  At one point after World War II, Iran’s democracy wanted to repatriate its oil industry from Britain and US corporations who had essentially colonized and parasitically exploited Iran for its oil. (The world’s original corporations were created by European nobility for colonization and economic exploitation and that remains the charter of large, national corporations around the world today.) CIA (Capitalism’s Invisible Army) and MI6 overthrew Iranian democracy and installed a pliant thug, the Shah, who could be controlled by western corporations to maintain their grip on Iran’s oil industry and its profits.  The blowback from this was the 1979 Iranian coup that installed religious fundamentalists and completely destroyed Iranian constitutional democracy.  The unintended consequences of the American and British corporate state idiocracy. 

It’s interesting that Iran opened their own oil trading exchange within the last decade and, if I am not mistaken, excluded denominations in dollars.  But this was done specifically to exclude the U.S. from once again parasitically profiting on Iranian oil trade by forcing buyers and sellers to grant the U.S. control of Iranian trade.  If the CIA overthrew the Iranian democracy 70 years ago for this very reason, what’s the chance they are doing it again today?  Without looking, I believe in 2009 or 2010, the Iranian oil exchange was the only oil trading bourse in the world not controlled by U.S. dollar hegemony.  This move by Iran would then be one of the largest threats to U.S. corporate empire and would almost certainly place Iran on a CIA/military-industrial complex “list” of existential terrorist threats to the U.S.  In other words, for Iran’s attempt to break free of U.S. interventionism and economic exploitation, Iran was granted the label of terrorist state.

Libya was another oil-rich nation on the same path as Iran because they dumped all of their dollars acquired from oil sales for gold under Gaddafi.  Again, I’m not stating Libya or Iran is virtuous.  To the contrary, Gaddafi certainly was no saint.  And, Iran is ruled by a repressive fundamentalist theocracy. (We are ruled by a repressive fundamentalist-neoliberal-free market corporate theocracy.)   But, the U.S. war machine turned Libya into a completely failed state where true slavery and open human trafficking are the booming industries.  This was no doubt for the same reason as Iran.  That is, Libya was trying to get out from under U.S. corporate empire’s parasitic control of Libya’s resources.  Life was certainly better for most under Gaddafi as the lesser of two evils.  In fact, this lesser of two evils analysis is generally consistent with American empire’s endless destructions of states around the world. By the way, where did all of that Libyan gold go? You know, the gold they bought with U.S. petrodollars rather than recycle those dollars into buying U.S. debt?  Wanna bet the CIA and MI6 knows where that gold is?  Sounds very similar to the actions against Venezuela and their oil-rich and mineral rich reserves as well.   In fact, it sound a lot like many nations with resources the U.S. corporate state is trying to exploit or control.

The Iranians have been taking shots at American interests in the Middle East for years.  Suleimani was their CIA-ish general or operative in charge of foreign rabblerousing outside of Iranian borders.  But, then the U.S. has been waging economic war on Iran as well.  Devastating economic war.  I talk a lot about U.S. corporate empire, dollar hegemony and the like.  But, I’m quite certain there are very few people in this world who really understand how this dynamic works from a complex systems standpoint.  In other words, inputs, outputs, variables and how the system controls every other nation on earth.  I’m not going to write a technical research book on here about how it does work but I’ll make a few comments where you can draw your own conclusions as it pertains to Iran, Venezuela, Libya and the like.  (Wikileaks exposed the U.S. government’s regime change manual and the deep bowels of the CIA and military-industrial complex in concert with Wall Street likely devises these regime change policies using the cabal of Wall Street and U.S. vassal state bankers to execute them.)  Most politicians in the U.S. are almost certainly mostly clueless dolts as to how this works.  But, then our government isn’t really run by clueless politicians.  They are clueless for a reason.  They must be of low moral character and of little ethical virtue in order to take direction from the Patrician economic class just as was the Roman Empire.  Our nation is run by major corporations and the military-industrial complex.  All the politicians need to do is as they are told by our real masters without understanding any of the consequences to a system of massive grift and theft around the world.  (No waxing poetic about the past either.  This isn’t anything new either. This has been going on for 150+ years. What has changed is the instantaneous access to information that many citizens have used to become civically conscious. Democracy is a frightening fear of the corporate state.)

I’m not going to get into the detailed explanations but one could write a book about this topic as it’s very diverse and deep in its machinations. 

To make this as black and white as possible, the U.S. essentially has blockaded Iran from the dollar currency and international trade settlement system that essentially requires it for about 70% of all global trade regardless of nation. (If the EU, Britain and Japan join in on sanctions, it’s about 96% of global trade.)  This is an act of war with consequences just as dire as missiles and guns.  What does that mean?  Iran’s currency, the rial, has a floating exchange rate against the dollar based on supply and demand.  (A crooked system foisted on the world by the U.S. after WWII.)  Currency traders, which are dominated by large American and western corporations and state actors (because the dollar is forcibly required to be used in international trade settlement) can essentially drop the bid for Iranian currency in the markets and/or sell massive reserves to pummel a third world thinly-traded currency.  (This is a simplistic view of what happens but serves for illustrative purposes. In actuality there are numerous economic weapons the U.S. has at its disposal to torch currencies with limited international liquidity (smaller, underdeveloped and third world nations) and employ economic warfare. That includes the IMF, where the U.S. has veto rights and just vetoed a coronavirus aid package to Venezuela.  Iran has also just applied for an IMF aid package and it will be telling if the U.S. vetoes it as well.)  Let’s just make up some numbers as an example.   Let’s say one dollar is equal to one Iranian rial. (This is not the case.)   When the U.S. puts financial sanctions on Iran, especially when including its vassal states, and the EU, the bid for the worth of their currency implodes.  That could mean overnight that it now takes ten rials to equal one dollar.  Or, the currency has essentially lost about 90% of its value overnight.  Or, put another way, dollar-induced inflation in Iran has gone from, say zero for illustrative purposes, to nearly 1.000% in the drop of a hat.   And that means anything Iran wishes to buy on the global market now costs ten times as much money.  Imagine going out to buy a car that was $20,000 and tomorrow it is $200,000 as is everything else equally expensive.  Medicine, food, industrial equipment and on and on.  Or, overnight, Iran has lost 90% of its domestic purchasing power on the international market.  I’m not going into details on how this actually happens as there are mechanics that make this more complicated including how this creates a black market for dollars within Iran, as an example, and how people try to subvert this process.  The point is that this kind of pressure is exerted constantly with nations all around the world.  The flip side of this is that thugs and dictators that are pliant to U.S. interests see the benefits of this system because the U.S. will prop up their fraudulent economy and currency. There are many angles to this game that are irrelevant to what is really going on. What’s really going on is the U.S. corporate empire is at war with the world.  And, this war is used to open markets for American and vassal state corporations to loot and pillage countries via economic warfare.

What choices does Iran have now with a relatively worthless currency due to economic warfare?  It can do without internationally-sourced goods and services.  It can prioritize its international purchases to acquire what is only necessary, it can barter with other states and trade oil for goods or it can starve if that money is needed for food.  Bartering is really the primary choice.  Or, increase exports and accept pennies on the dollar for their goods.  I’ve noted on here ages ago that we would see an uptick in global bartering.  This is one reason why as the global economic order experiences massive dislocations.  Oh, don’t worry, we are just getting started.  Recent actions in the global currency markets is pointing to massive trouble ahead across a whole range of issues. More on that in an upcoming post.

This is what the U.S. is doing to Venezuela today.  It is a main reason, if not the only substantial reason, why Venezuela is experiencing massive inflation as their currency craters against the dollar.  The U.S. media tells us it’s because Venezuela is a socialist state and socialism doesn’t work.  This is pure propaganda without debating the pros and cons of capitalism versus socialism as acts of economic control systems.  There’s a reasonable analysis that the U.S. may have pulled a trick like this on Russia some decades ago that led to the collapse of the Russian ruble.  It was a substantially different variation of this game but it caused the Russian ruble crisis and destroyed the savings of Russian citizens.  The Arab Spring was caused by a variation of this scheme where American corporations cornered the global rice market and drove prices into the stratosphere where poor people couldn’t feed their families. It’s also how the U.S. and, frankly the EU, forces countries into economic submission and the fire sale of sovereign country assets to generally American, British and German corporations.   Oh, China has their own game they are perfecting.  So, it’s not just the U.S.  It’s a different game but it’s still just as sinister. But, the U.S. is the dominant economic empire and holds most of the cards until it doesn’t.  And, this will all end just as the Roman Empire and British Empire pulled off similar tyrannical schemes.

This helps explain why the U.S. needs such a massive military.  It is used to enforce economic warfare on the world and to ensure the forced use of dollars in global trade settlement.

Do you know what your government and American corporations do this around the world?  Over and again?  It doesn’t really matter.  There’s no way out of the system.  Everyone in our nation is complicit simply by participating in our society.  It doesn’t matter if your work or job is virtuous.  The money we all use is fungible.  And, it’s blood money.  To be honest, it’s no different than the Nazis on many levels. Or, the Romans or any empire. And, the U.S. empire has likely caused tens of millions of deaths around the world with their endless meddling, economic suffering and constant war. 

The U.S. uses similar control schemes against its citizens by forcing us into a system of day labor for whatever value the corporate state is willing to pay you. And, when it’s done extracting what it needs, disposing of us. Or, forcing us to spend most waking moments thinking about how to make money rather than creating connection and a more compassionate, harmonious existence with each other, the world and the planet.  If you refuse to comply, you become the object of the same economic warfare.  Some of it is psychological, some social and all of it is economic violence by essentially impoverishing you as it does with Iran and Venezuela.  There’s no free market for labor in the U.S.  There’s only slavery.  The veil has been pulled back with this viral outbreak if you were unable to see it before.  The U.S. relies on non-citizens, the working poor and tens of millions of people who are exploited for the benefit of ruling class and those who do their bidding. 

Do you see why this might be some indication of why terrorists target the U.S.?  Is this financial terrorism on the part of the U.S.?  How many innocent people are impacted around the world?  How many tens of millions of people in countless situations for the better part of the last century were denied medicine or food or whatnot?  How many diasporas and refugees has this created around the world courtesy of U.S. empire?  How many terrorists has this created?

How many lying liars and ignoramuses in the financial blogosphere, TV, in financial print and on Wall Street have bloviated endless sanctimonious bullshit about a system that has made them rich but yet they have no understanding of how?  Willful ignorance to ethical and moral issues because the system lines their pockets with wealth.  Just like all authoritarian regimes where a plutocratic class sucks the life out of society.  The wealthy and the professional class support it because it has made them wealthy, famous, successful or whatnot.   This free trade agreement brainwashing is pure propaganda and there are endless supportive useful idiots who grow rich but don’t understand that they ultimately create their own slavery and yours in support of a system like this.  Obama’s free trade scheme would have extended this.  NAFTA extends this.  CAFTA extends this.  China’s trade deal with the U.S. extends this.  It’s all the same scheme of exploitation through pathological control.

The deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more rotten and outright evil you realize the entire system is.  At one point I considered there was the possibility of reform. I’m past that. Corporate capitalism’s endless contradictions, and the greater-and-greater control it must exert to maintain this system will eventually topple itself as has every control system conceived by class and hierarchy to control the masses and enrich themselves at the working class’ expense.  And, by working class, I mean doctors, teachers, retail clerks, farmers… we are all exploited.

So, what’s the real reason we killed an Iranian official and have been waging economic war against Iran?  There are far deeper forces at work here.  And, absolutely nothing in the mainstream media is going to tell you what is really going on.  Not because it’s some secret.  Although they certainly may be unknowingly under the influence of being fed misinformation by the CIA or whatnot. 

So, do you understand why the U.S. spends so much money on the military?  To ensure this system of violence is enforced.  Because like Rome, we are an economic empire.  And, empire extracts its wealth from the world through theft. When you hear politicians say that we are the wealthiest nation on earth, it’s not because we create that wealth. In fact, we steal the vast majority of it.  At one point we did create our own wealth but those days ended long ago when we transitioned from a corporate economic empire to a corporate financial empire.  And, that game has a limited shelf life as I’m confident we will find out in our lifetimes.  Possibly by 2022 if my anticipated outcomes happen within the next twenty months.  So far, they are looking quite promising.