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Caitlin Johnstone
Title: Empire Managers Are FuckingIdiots
Published: 2022-06-06
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux79YVPzVOQ
Title: Empire Managers Are FuckingIdiots
Published: 2022-06-06
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux79YVPzVOQ
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Empire managers are fucking idiots. A recent article in Politico's Lockheed Martin sponsored National Security Daily newsletter featured a quote from an Empire think tanker who argued that the tyranny of Saudi Arabia's murderous crown prince Muhammad bin Salman, MBS, can be tempered by sending him to seminars. In Saudi Arabia shows Biden can't have it all. Politico describes an entirely imaginary conflict of presidential interests between a sincere2/12
desire to prioritize humanitarian concerns in Saudi Arabia, and a need to maintain warm relations with Riyadh to keep oil prices low amid Washington's economic war against Moscow. I say entirely imaginary because of course the US would happily turn a blind eye to Saudi royals using babies for ski shooting as long as they continued to advance US fossil fuel interests. The article features all the usual mundane3/12
empire apology you'd expect from a mainstream publication that is funded by war profiteers, the newsletter was sponsored by Northrop Grumman before Lockheed Martin. But one part stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of sheer foam-brained idiocy, arguing that the US can advance both its fossil fuel interests and its super important humanitarian concerns. A denizen of the imperial hive mind named Kirsten Fountainrose is cited4/12
in the following text. Quote, using Saudi Arabia to lower gas prices and secure geopolitical gains doesn't have to be divorced from human rights promotion if the US molds the wayward crown prince into a moral king. Shaping young leaders into the types of decision-makers America would like as partners, takes mentoring, monitoring, and shaping, said Kirsten Fountainrose, a former top Middle East official on Trump's National Security Council.5/12
There is no reason we can't establish something akin to a private seminar series for MBS and the inner circle, as well as other young leaders in the Gulf or elsewhere around the globe. And, quote, yawza. So in Fountainrose's Empire-Addled Brain, the US can simply provide private seminars, not just for MBS, but for other foreign leaders, as well, teaching them not to do atrocities and war crimes.6/12
And this will reconcile the glaring dissonance between what the US government says at values and what it actually does. That's the kind of thinking that gets you made into a top national security advisor in the government with the most powerful military force ever assembled. Indeed, that's the kind of thinking that runs the empire. Fountainrose is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a NATO-entrenched think7/12
tank that is funded by government entities, the military industrial complex, fossil fuel companies, and plutocrats. When questioned by the American prospect last year about the fact that the Atlantic Council has received millions from Gulf state monarchies, Fountainrose responded, everything tank in Washington gets money from Middle East governments. This is true. Generally speaking, think tanks are institutions wherein academics are paid by the worst people in the8/12
world to come up with intelligent sounding reasons why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid. Those narratives are then inserted at key points of influence before decision makers and the public. This is not the sort of environment which lends itself to lucid thinking. Fountainrose's Atlantic Council bio reads like a recipe for turning a human brain into a cog in the imperial9/12
machine from Harvard to the National Council on US Arab relations to building relationships with military officers and diplomats from the Middle East and South Asia for the Near East Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, two positions in the Pentagon and State Department, two senior director for the Gulf at the Trump Administration's National Security Council, and then on to the Atlantic Council. And at10/12
the Atlantic Council, she shall wait, spewing imperial mouthfarts and earning handsome paychecks until it's time for the revolving door of the Beltway swamp to usher her back into a government position again. These are the kind of people who run the world. The imperial machine is packed to the rafters with sniveling power worshippers of this variety. People who choose to spend their lives clawing their way up11/12
into positions of influence within the most depraved power structure on the face of this planet, demonstrating their worthiness by their continual willingness to advocate awful things no matter how reckless or stupid. This is why the world is as it is. The systems which allocate power and wealth elevate the worst among us to the most consequential of positions, where they are then free to act out their