by Alex Christoforou, The Duran:
The U.S. has 917 foreign military bases (besides the 749 inside the U.S.). All other countries taken together have 399. The U.S. spends 65% of the entire world’s military costs (that’s expenses — not referring to the enormous damages that those costs have been paying to create in the targeted countries) — all of the approximately 200 other countries together spend only 35% of the global total.
The U.S. Government and its thousands of propagandists use all sorts of methods to low-ball (currently to around $900 billion per year) the money that it spends per year on its military, but without all of those tricks to deceive the public, the actual total is over $1.5 trillion, which is 65% of the global total — and yet right now the Trump Administration SEEMS to be focusing INSTEAD on cutting OTHER parts of the federal budget. And yet the ONLY U.S. federal Department that has never yet passed an audit is the ‘Defense’ Department, (the OTHER roughly $600B per year that the Government spends on its military is being paid out from the OTHER federal Departments — which ARE annually audited, and which the Trump team have thus far been searching to find and expose the “waste, fraud, and abuse”).
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
No propaganda-organ (‘news’-medium) in the U.S. empire (NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand) even acknowledges that the U.S. empire exists. Mere mention of it is effectively prohibited from being made public by the empire’s ‘news’-media. Many critics of ‘democracies’ in capitalist countries call this prohibition (or “censorship”) by the phrase that Edward S. Herman introduced for it, “manufacturing consent”, which technique — constant self-censorship that’s practised so as to please the advertisers and the Government that they control (by their billionaires’ mega-donations to each of the two political Parties) — is done by media in the U.S. empire so that such Governments can then label any Government that the U.S. Government is trying to “regime-change” or overthrow-and-replace by a stooge, a government that is “autocratic,” or even “dictatorial,” or even a “tyranny”; and, so, this is why “manufacturing (the public’s) consent” is crucial to the further growth of the empire, by such ‘democracies’. (No empire can even POSSIBLY be democratic; they are intrinsically dictatorships, regardless of what their Constitution might say. Of course, throughout history, empires have claimed to be legitimate according to whatever standards were prevailing, at the time — but all empires are intrinsically gangland operations.)
This empire — the world’s only remaining empire, other than some of its colonies’ empires, the largest of which is Britain’s, if that can realistically even be called an “empire” after it co-founded the U.S. empire on 25 July 1945 and subordinated itself to the greater power of America — is now finally breaking up. Thus far in the Second Term of President Trump, his decisions have greatly accelerated this process, and his propaganda for those decisions is not the truth, which is that the U.S. Government is itself widely regarded around the world as being the single biggest threat to world peace and has in fact been the global aggressor ever since Harry Truman became America’s President in 1945. Instead, the case he presents iis that America’s colonies are just too costly for U.S. taxpayers to continue ‘protecting’ against (according to him) Russia, China and Iran — three countries that, at least ever since 1991, have never posed ANY danger to either the U.S. or its ‘allies’ (excepting possibly only Israel, which Iran’s Government really IS committed to ending — but hasn’t any means by which it can achieve that objective). So, while Trump is not trying to educate the empire’s public about actual history (such as regarding Ukraine and Taiwan, and Israel) that is being hidden from that public by the regime’s media, and which explains the reality, he does seem to be trying to address and reduce the problem of America’s empire over-extending itself as it has been doing in recent decades. Unlike many other commentators, I won’t speculate here about what his actual motives and priorities are for doing this, and for doing it in the way that he is. But we are now in the period of the decline of the American empire.
At its start, the joint UK/U.S. empire (soon thereafter to begin growing to become the U.S.-controlled colossus that exists today) was publicly introduced to the world on 5 March 1946, by Winston Churchill (with its co-founder President Truman in attendance), at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in Churchill’s famous “Special Relationship” and “Iron Curtain” speech, which declared not ONLY that the United States and the British Empire HAVE this “Special Relationship,” but that the Soviet Union had set up an Iron Curtain which “the democracies” must break down. This was a two-faced speech, on 5 March 1946, which in its second half introduced BOTH the “Special Relationship” AND the “Iron Curtain” to contain and ultimately end that “Curtain” and the Soviet Union’s Government, but which deceptively threw in praise for ‘the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshall Stalin,” so as to hide Churchill’s real (and secret) intention, which was for the U.S. and UK ultimately to invade and conquer the Soviet Union. This war was to be propagandistically called “the Cold War,” but both Churchill and Truman knew that it might become not only World War Three but apocalyptic — so “hot” as to be perhaps even world-ending.
Truman had, in fact, known about this intention by Churchill (to proceed immediately into World War Three and conquer the Soviet Union), especially because Truman had earlier, in May 1945, rejected, as being impractical, a proposal that Churchill’s team had (at Churchill’s request) drafted for the U.S. and UK jointly to invade and conquer the Soviet Union starting on 1 July 1945. It was called “Operation Unthinkable”. At the UK’s National Archives is an article by the military historian Jonathan Walker about it, “Operation Unthinkable: Churchill’s plan for World War Three”, which was based on his 2013 book, Operation Unthinkable: The Third World War: British Plans to Attack the Soviet Empire 1945. Although one reviewer of that book noted critically against it,
