A Trifecta of Trump Destructiveness

He sabotaged the attempts by his own Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, former boss of oil giant ExxonMobil, to start up negotiations with North Korea, putting the U.S. on a collision course to possible nuclear war.

His EPA is gutting emissions standards for coal-fired power plants. This is signing a death warrant for people, and additional disease. (But to be fair, it only affects people who breathe air.) Scott Pruitt, Trump's hand-picked EPA boss, was formerly Oklahoma State Attorney General, from which post he waged relentless war on the EPA on behalf of oil and gas corporations who literally gave him his marching orders in explicit instructions. His 14 lawsuits against the EPA all failed in the Federal courts. Now he is destroying the EPA from within.

He issued regulations allowing companies with religious or "moral" objections to contraception to deny contraception coverage in their company health insurance plans. Keeping Women Barefoot and Pregnant in the 21th Century! That's Making America Great Again!

So the man in just a few days is threatening mass murder, thousands of cases of disease and death, and denying a basic human right to control one's own reproduction and protection from veneral diseases. Winning!

I have the BEST IDEAS, EVER!

Obama Would Have Assassinated North Korea's Rulers, If He Could Have

Did you know that Obama fully intended to "take out" the entire rulership of North Korea? Neither did I, until I came across this tidbit hidden in a New York Times article from March, moaning about the North Korean "threat" to the U.S.

Get a load of this paragraph, buried way down in a lengthy article, the 39th paragraph of a 47 paragraph long story, interspersed with charts, photos, and captions:

"With only a few months left in office, he [Obama] pushed aides for new approaches [to cripple North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs]. At one meeting, he declared that he would have targeted the North Korean leadership and weapons sites if he thought it would work. But it was, as Mr. Obama and his assembled aides knew, an empty threat: Getting timely intelligence on the location of North Korea’s leaders or their weapons at any moment would be almost impossible, and the risks of missing were tremendous, including renewed war on the Korean Peninsula." [My emphasis.] [1]

Incredibly, yet not surprisingly, the U.S. media ignored this. Apparently it was too insignificant to them to spread the news around.

Nor is it surprising, even if it's shocking, that Obama had such a determined intent to assassinate the rulers of a foreign nation. Obama proved himself a cold-blooded, ruthless killer, personally reviewing a "kill list" of people to be assassinated, every week. He murdered teenagers, children, old women. He gave the Saudi regime the weapons and intelligence it needed (and the assistance of the aerial refueling tanker planes of the U.S. Air Force to enable the jets the Saudis purchased from the U.S. to fly their missions) to reduce Yemen to a state of starvation, with a raging cholera epidemic. Unless Putin can add to Russia's body count in Syria, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama will go down in history as bloodier than the Russian autocrat that American media and the blaterariat elite like to call a "murderer." Certainly in terms of specific individuals targeted for assassination, Obama is leagues above Putin.

But what's more significant is the fact that North Korea really IS at risk from the U.S. It is NOT paranoid for the North Korean regime to feel great danger from the U.S. The U.S. is constantly practicing nuclear war attacks on North Korea. It just did it again, flying B-1 strategic bombers from Guam (a weapon originally designed to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons) right up to North Korea's coast, escorted by U.S. fighter jets from Japan. So why isn't it defensive for North Korea to develop the means to strike those U.S. bases in japan and Guam? In fact, it was after an earlier U.S. "exercise" practicing nuking North Korea from Guan that NK "threatened" to fire a test missile in the vicinity of Guam, which it backed down from after Trump expectorated yet another of his blood-curdling threats to annihilate NK.

I'm no sympathizer of the North Korean regime, as should be clear to regular readers of this site. It is a hellish place to live, a nightmare of totalitarian regimentation, a hereditary oppressive cult system. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have the right of self-defense. It is obvious that the North Korean rulers are not suicidal. Vicious and malign, certainly. But not insane. They would never out of the blue initiate a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies, and it is completely dishonest of the U.S. government and media to pretend otherwise, which is the assumption underlying all the propaganda about the NK nuclear "threat."

Hereditary NK dictator Kim Jon-un just stated that the goal of their nuclear and missile programs is "equilibrium" with the U.S., that is, having enough of a balance in terms of destructive potential that the U.S. could no longer attack NK and not suffer unacceptable damage in return. In other words, deterrence. But that is unacceptable to the U.S. And the U.S. has gotten the UN Security Council to go along with that. Of the five permanent members of that body, the UK and France would follow U.S. wishes. Russia and China have no interest in a nuclear-armed North Korea, especially since it could prompt other nations in the region to acquire nuclear weapons (especially Japan and South Korea). Those with nuclear arms like their privilege, and the leverage it gives them. They all share an interest in keeping the nuclear "club" small.

So the U.S. has gotten the UN to impose 9 sets of sanctions on NK in 11 years. And it has sabotaged the North's missile and nuclear programs through various covert means, some of which is reported in the aforementioned NY Times article. With Trump, the U.S. stance has become openly belligerent and threatening. (And Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's recent assertion that the U.S. has no desire for "regime change" in NK was a smarmy lie.) But the fact of the matter is, North Korea has shown over the years that it cannot be intimidated. Which means that ratcheting up threats to annihilate it (Trump just did it again) will only escalate tensions and create a more dangerous situation. Kim Jon-un's regime has just stated that it will launch an attack if the U.S. is preparing to attack it!

There are two lines the U.S. government and media put out on negotiations, First is that the North Koreans are unreasonably refusing "to come to the negotiating table," All they have to do is show a "willingness" to negotiate. How? By completely halting their weapons development programs in advance of any negotiations! Well no wonder they aren't "willing to negotiate"! Surrender in advance, then we'll talk to you. I know what I would say to that, and it would involve salty language!

The other line is that past negotiations "didn't work" because the North Koreans never honored the deals. That is false, as Tim Shorrock of The Nation magazine has documented in a series of articles. The agreement the Clinton regime negotiated held for almost a decade. It broke down after the U.S. reneged on its part of the bargain, not delivering the agree amounts of fuel oil and failing to come through with the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors in NK. So the North Koreans restarted work on nuclear weapons development. [2]

What NK wants, as it has repeatedly stated, is a cessation of hostilities with the U.S. (a formal end to the Korean War, which has never been legally ended), an end to threatening U.S. military maneuvers, and more normal relations. Russia and China some months back proposed that the North freeze its weapons testing and the U.S. stop its practice attacks on North Korea to start negotiations. The U.S. brushed them off with contempt. Trump's hand-picked UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, the former GOP governor of the Confederate state of South Caroline, spat on the proposal as "insulting."  This after the U.S. ignored the Chinese-Russian repeated suggestion for 6 months. (By the way, South Carolina started the American Civil War. It was the first state to secede to form the Confederate States of America, and it initiated hostilities by laying siege to Fort Sumter, a U.S. military base in South Carolina. Haley is a hard-rightwing GOP politician from one of the most racist and reactionary states in the U.S.)

The U.S. hates to compromise just on principle- namely the principle that the strong shouldn't have to make any concessions to the weak. And its elites equate that principle with morality. Thus their genuine outrage when any weaker nation defies them. (Although when it comes to China, a nation almost as strong as the U.S. and on which much U.S. corporate profit depends as a source of cheaply-manufactured good, the U.S. isn't so brave.)

1]  "Trump Inherits a Secret Cyberwar Against North Korean Missiles," New York Times, March 4, 2017.

2]  See Shorrock's articles at The Nation.

Yeah, so I killed some folks. Wanna make something out of it?

 

Incompetent Trump's Ploy to End North Korean Threats Backfires, Causing New Threats

Well, that worked out well.

U.S. president Donald J. (J. stands for "Jackass," apparently) Trump threatens North Korea with nuclear annihilation, a threat seconded by his "Defense" (War) Secretary, former general James "Mad Dog" Mattis (the nickname was bestowed by his military colleagues on the bloodthirsty Mattis, who has opined that he enjoys killing), if NK makes any more bellicose threats against the U.S., and what happens? North Korea makes new threats. And now, a specific threat to launch a practice attack near the Pacific island of Guam, U.S. territory with U.S. military bases, with four missiles, in preparation for a nuclear strike.

So today Trump took another break from his golfing vacation to announce that what he said might not have been "tough enough." U.S. media are calling this, as is their habit when Trump amplifies one of his outre statements instead of backing and filling, "doubling down." Doubling down is a gambling term that means piling more money on a bet. (Usually a bad bet.)

Trump is a creature of habit, and an ignorant man. Since he has always surrounded himself with sycophants, he remains unaware of just how ignorant he is. He bathes his psyche in his own egotism, convincing himself that he is brilliant. Inside this apparently impenetrable psychological bubble, his self-regard is reinforced by the flattery of his courtiers. (Recall the recent sick show where the world was treated to the sight of his cabinet, the top U.S. government officials, going around the table lauding Trump! The political decadence of the U.S. on display for all to see, who have eyes.) Not just egotism, but egoism too, the feeling that one is at the center of the world, is a chronic condition Trump has.

One of Trump's lifelong habits is using bullying and intimidation to get his way. And with no self-awareness or self-reflection (no one could act the way Trump habitually does, and we have years of video evidence of his grotesquely flamboyant and inappropriate behavior, unless they lacked self-awareness) and existing in the bubble of his self-delusion of personal greatness, he simply does what he always does. So he threatened nuclear annihilation of another country to intimidate it. Only it didn't work.

But Trump never learns from his mistakes. He merely does more of the same, or retreats and focuses his attention elsewhere when his stock existential reactions to obstacles fail to produce the results he seeks.

By the way, why don't Trump's enemies in the power structure (media, politicians, and secret police) ever use the word "incompetent" in their attacks on him? Seems pretty obvious that he is.
Maybe competence is besides the point for them. The incompetence of Reagan and Bush the Younger didn't much bother them. As long as the Emperor goes along with the imperialist program, no problem. The system runs itself. The problem is when the Emperor isn't on the same page, as with Trump's alleged friendly attitude towards Designated Enemy Russia, ruled by the Demonic Putin. (Or in JFK's case, "dangerous softness" towards "Communism.")

Which should make people who think Bernie Sanders could have saved us rethink the idea that just electing a "good" president is the solution. Sanders would have been tied into knots by the power structure, had he become president. The system walls off positions that temporarily fall into "unreliable" hands. Even the top position.

OH! Did I just step in doo-doo again?

Trump Threatens Nuclear Obliteration of North Korea If It Makes More Threats: NK Immediately Makes A Threat, Calling Trump's Bluff

President Bluster still hasn't gotten the hang of this presidency thing, it would seem.

Donald Trump took time out from his 17-day vacation at one of his golf resorts to threaten the nuclear obliteration of North Korea if they so much as make more threats against the U.S.- not if they actually attack the U.S.

"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like, the world has never seen." And he said it twice, to make sure it's clear he was being deliberate and he meant it: "He has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said, they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before." (Well maybe some other world has, eh?) [1]

So, did that fearsome warning of U.S. fire and brimstone stop the North Korean threats? Within an hour, NK responded with a threat to nuke Guam, a Pacific island and site of important U.S. military bases.

After the North Korean threat to blow up Guam, U.S. Secretary of State Rex "Big Oil" Tillerson rushed forth to make reassuring noises. He reinterpreted and distorted what Trump had actually said to pretend all Trump said was that the U.S. could defend itself. He told Americans they could "sleep well at night," meaning no danger here. And the governor of Guam, a U.S. colony (the U.S. calls its colonies "territories," to pretend it isn't imperialist), advised his subjects that they were in no "immediate" danger. (Like, there's no chance they'll die in the next 15 minutes.)  [2]

But Tillerson's clean-up efforts were immediately undercut by "Defense" Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis, a former general, who immediately made another nuclear threat and sternly instructed North Korea not to try anything and to stop what it's doing, because that could "lead to the end of the regime and the destruction of its people."

In fact, for weeks Trump's "national security team" has been using threatening language against North Korea. Given the paranoid and fanatical and ultimately insecure nature of the regime, this is completely counterproductive. And since an actual attack on North Korea would be catastrophic for U.S. client South Korea, and very risky for the U.S., and sure to turn most of the world's population against the U.S., and create extreme hostility from China, it seems that the only sensible route is to try to calm North Korea, and strive for a reasonable goal like a freeze in North Korea's nuclear weapons program rather than abolition, in return for a peace treaty to formally end the Korean war and dialing down of U.S. military activity on the peninsula.

But that would be "weak." The U.S. is positively neurotic about "weakness." The most powerful nation in human history is actually quite pathetic in this regard. Instead of being confident in its strength, it feels that making any concession to an adversary is a gross humiliation. (Lyndon Johnson once referred to Vietnam as a dwarf with a knife which it would be shameful to not crush. The rhetoric is telling.)

What tripped off Trump's latest intemperate fulmination? Apparently an "analysis" from the DIA ("Defense Intelligence" Agency- now there's an oxymoron) that was planted in the Washington Post claiming that North Korea now had miniaturized a nuclear bomb so it could be put on a missile as a warhead, thus enabling it to actually attack U.S. territory with a nuclear weapon.

A word is in order here about the DIA's reliability. It stinks. One example should suffice to prove that the DIA can never be trusted:

During Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran in the 1980s during the Reagan regime, the U.S. sided with Iraq because Iran had been taken over by Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs after overthrowing the U.S.-installed tyrant the Shah. Hussein used poison gas against Iraqi Kurdish villages. The DIA put out a report claiming Iran did it- a pure, conscious lie. In other words, the DIA put out what purported to be an objective, scientific analysis that was pure disinformation serving a hidden U.S. political agenda. And of course, when later Saddam was converted into an enemy, the gassing of the Kurds was hammered over and over as part of the indictment of how evil he was. (The U.S., both government and media, are nothing if not supremely cynical.) Naturally, the fraudulent DIA report was never mentioned again.

And generally, secret police agencies like the DIA are composed of manipulative liars and cynical power mongers, fanatical nationalists and ideologues whose objectivity is, shall we say, somewhat impaired.

As for the current DIA claim that North Korea has already miniaturized atomic bombs, something it was supposedly several years away from doing: Could it be that this is more DIA disinformation, designed to cause trouble? It wouldn't be the first time the U.S. military worked to provoke war. Ever hear of the Tonkin Gulf incident? ("Hoax" would be a more accurate term.) And the DIA is an extremely reactionary organ of the U.S. military. The fanatical Islam-hater Michael Flynn, briefly Trump's "National Security" advisor and now a target for allegedly playing footsie with Russia, was made head of the DIA by Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama.

The Deep State, after all, considers itself the True Guardian of the National Interest. Presidents who don't go along with it are either manipulated to get in line, maneuvered around, painted into a corner, or neutralized. So who knows what byzantine plot the DIA may be up to?

Currently the U.S. Congress has been busily tying Trump's hands, forcing him to sign a law imposing additional punitive sanctions on Russia, barring him from firing the special counsel, grand inquisitor Robert Mueller III, and threatening to refuse to allow him to replace the Confederate racist Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as Attorney General. And the Deep State secret police agencies FBI, CIA, and the NSA, a military agency, have been planting damaging "information" against Trump, his family, and his minions, almost daily, in the media.

We just don't know if the DIA report is accurate or not. But the DIA is not trustworthy, so we can't assume one way or the other at this point. [3]

It would be worse than ironic if a nuclear war resulted from the U.S.' own disinformation. But then, the U.S. blew up the Twin Towers plus number 7 World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and ever since has reacted to its own self-provocation with a global jihad against jihadism and the perfection of the world's most complete surveillance state ever.

                                                                               Oooh, scary!

1]  Trump later added a false boast via Twitter, his favorite communication medium, that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is "more powerful than ever." (He does epitomize the unhealthy American obsession with power.) Actually the U.S. nuclear arsenal at its peak numbered 30,000 weapons, consisting of 20,000 strategic weapons and 10,000 "tactical" or "battlefield" nukes, such as atomic land mines, atomic artillery shells, atomic bombs carried in backpacks. The U.S. arsenal has been reduced to around 4,000 strategic weapons- still enough to destroy the world. Typically the atomic bombs are around 300 kilotons each- a kiloton denoting an explosive force equal to a thousand tons of TNT. A megaton is a million tons of TNT- the U.S. used to have megaton-range bombs, but with more accurate delivery systems and multiple bombs per missile warhead and bomber, the greater power was superfluous.

For comparison, the atomic bombs that destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, had estimated yields around 13 and 18 kilotons, respectively. The man who ordered those attacks on a defenseless, defeated nation, Harry S Truman (no period after the S, S wasn't a middle initial, S was the man's middle name, a fact that U.S. propagandists insist on obfuscating by putting an incorrect period where it doesn't belong) announced in part after obliterating Hiroshima, "If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth." How very Trumpian. Or Trump is Trumanesque.

2]  Guam is the site of U.S. military bases that are key to U.S. dominance over the vast Pacific Ocean. Its native inhabitants, ignorant simpletons, join the U.S. military, their conquerors, in large numbers. At some point they were made U.S. citizens, like Puerto Ricans, another U.S. island conquest and colony. Puerto Ricans have been used as U.S. cannon fodder since World War I.

3]  The DIA is the creation of Robert S. McNamara. McNamara, the notorious Vietnam War criminal and Secretary of "Defense" (War) during the regimes of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was jealous of the CIA, and decided to create his own CIA inside the Pentagon, the DIA. (As if the U.S. needed yet another malign secret police organ.) McNamara was supposedly a real intellectual whiz, who headed Ford Motor Company prior to his government "service."

McNamara had experience as a war criminal long before the U.S. destruction of Vietnam, it turned out. We only learned this when McNamara spoke relatively candidly to documentarian Errol Morris. McNamara reminisced about his time as right hand man to general Curtis LeMay, the psychopathic mad bomber, during World War II. LeMay commanded a fleet of giant B-29 bombers (much larger planes than the famous B-17s) which he used to burn 67 Japanese cities to the ground prior to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (His predecessor resigned the position as he couldn't stomach the requirement to slaughter civilians on a mass scale.) McNamara's role was to calculate the most effective way to torch the cities and immolate their inhabitants.

McNamara relates a particularly damning episode when LeMay said to him that if the U.S. loses the war, he and McNamara would be tried as war criminals.

According to Noam Chomsky, on the day Japan surrendered, LeMay launched a final 1,000 bomber raid on Japan, a particularly vindictive act.

LeMay went on to head the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, the nuclear attack forces of the U.S. Air Force. He was an ardent advocate for nuking the Soviet Union, and later Vietnam. The fact that such psychopaths routinely rise to the top levels of U.S. power is quite revelatory about the nature of the U.S. system.

North Korean Regime Murders Tourist For Swiping Propaganda Poster

Last year the totalitarian cult regime of North Korea once again showed its extreme hostility to people foolish enough to visit the demented nation. American tourist Otto Warmbier was arrested for trying to take a propaganda poster as a souvenir. Convicted of "subversion," he received a sentence of 15 years of hard labor. (U.S. court typically mete out much longer sentences for "seditious conspiracy.")

But Otto didn't have to serve his sentence. A few weeks ago the North Koreans dumped him off on the U.S. in a coma, which they absurdly claimed was caused by botulism and a medication. (American doctors found no evidence of botulism.) Otto's brain was missing large amounts of tissue in all areas.

Otto just died. He was 22.

I don't understand why people keep going to North Korea. This is a pattern of theirs, seizing foreigners and using them as bargaining chips, or just taking out their political psychosis on them. In addition to frequent arrests, there was the murder of a South Korean woman tourist by a North Korean border guard a few years ago.

Actually the North Koreans aren't way off base to assume that American visitors are spies. Why else would anyone in their right mind want to go there? Other than that freak Dennis Rodman, Americans have not been welcome there. (If the CIA or other U.S. "intelligence agencies" sent spies, they'd probably not send their own personnel. Too risky. They'd get some journalist or whoever to report back to them. But no spy would be able to access much in the way of secrets there.)

I suspect the North Koreans savagely beat Otto, then waited for the external wounds to heal before shipping his comatose body back to his family. Nice. Or maybe a bad reaction to an experimental brainwashing drug? Whatever, true to form, the North Koreans refuse to explain but do their usual thing of shoving preposterous lies in the world's face that insult our intelligence. This soon after the cult dictator Kim Jong-un ordered the murder of his half brother in a Malaysian airport, which they followed up with more absurd lies and bellicose demands aimed at Malaysia for daring to do a proper investigation and arresting the perpetrators.

Someday, someone's gonna have to take care of these bastards.

Otto Warmbier in the grip of North Korean goons.

 Otto had good reason for feeling bad. But it would turn out much worse for him than he knew...

 So long, Otto.

Trump's Double Bluff of North Korea

U.S. emperor Donald John Trump said on April 12th that he was sending a carrier battle group steaming towards North Korea. “We are sending an armada, very powerful. We have submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier. We have the best military people on Earth. And I will say this: He [North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un] is doing the wrong thing,” Trump blustered on Murdoch’s propaganda cable TV channel Fox “News.” (Funny thing, though. While he was campaigning for president, Trump kept bellowing that the U.S. military was “hollowed out.” Maybe he filled the military void with his own personal Greatness.)

But an obvious bluff, as the U.S. simply can't attack that nation.

Well, it turns out he was bluffing about bluffing. The carrier group never headed towards North Korea.  It went to the Indian Ocean for joint exercises with the Australian navy.

What could be more lame than a fake bluff?

"Weak!" as a certain blowhard might say.

"Ya gotta be smart like ME if you wanna outfox dem Orientals!"

“Nothing to see here: U.S. carrier still thousands of miles from Korea,” Defense News, April 17, 2017.

Bully Boy Trump Meets His Match in Kim Jong-un

The U.S. habitually forces other nations to bend to its will by using diplomatic arm-twisting, economic warfare or brute military force. The U.S. has been using all three against North Korea since the Korean War, and since the regime of Clinton and running through Bush the Younger, Obama, and now Trump The Narcissist, the U.S. has been trying to reverse North Korea's nuclear weapons development, presumably with the addition of cyberwarfare in the arsenal of U.S. weaponry. [1]

But North Korea is proving a tough nut for the U.S. to crack.

The country has great internal cohesion, unlike easy targets of U.S. coups like Chile in 1973, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, or Ukraine in 2014, among other examples. Nor can the U.S. simply invade, as it did the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 19 83, Panama in 1989, Haiti and Nicaragua in the early 20th century, Cuba and the Philippines circa 1898 and so on.

The internal cohesion of NK is based on the extreme totalitarianism of the regime, and the effective brainwashing of the populace, backed by coercion. (Actually most nations rely on brainwashing through propaganda and indoctrination in the school system backed by coercion. That description certainly fits the U.S.) The impracticality of invasion stems from the fact that NK has nuclear weapons, and a conventional military that in any event would inflict significant casualties on a U.S. invasion force- something U.S. ruling elites are deathly afraid of, for good reasons.

Donald Trump, a lifelong bully, apparently thinks he can intimidate the North Koreans. That is amazingly obtuse. It is perfectly obvious that the North Koreans are extremely tough and very hard. Trump has been issuing verbal threats for several weeks, vowing to "take care of the problem" of North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs. His Secretary of State, Rex "Mr. ExxonMobil" Tillerson, has echoed the threats, saying that "all options are on the table," U.S.-gangsterspeak for You Better Be Afraid We Will Attack You With Our Military.

Currently Trump is rushing a carrier battle group at North Korea. NK's response has been a threat to launch a preemptive nuclear attack. In other words, if they think the U.S. is going to attack them, they will launch.

Whether or not that's a bluff, it is highly reckless of the Trump regime to test it.

A better tact would be to accept the reality that war with North Korea is simply insane, and negotiate. For one thing, there is no practical way to stop the North from destroying South Korea's capital and economic heart, Seoul, in a matter of hours with the 10,000 artillery pieces embedded in a mountain just over the border. Except maybe by hydrogen bombing the mountain, which would release vast quantites of radioactive fallout over South Korea and Japan and China and ineed the whole region (as well as float over the entire globe, including the U.S.). And of course the U.S. would simultaneously have to "take out" the North's nuclear arsenal- except that the U.S. does not know where all of it is hidden.

China has been advocating negotiations. True, previous negotiations "failed." That is, they produced temporary (or no) results. The first deal, cut by Clinton, might have worked if the U.S. hadn't double-crossed the North on a promise to build civilian nuclear power plants. (The U.S. said, Oh, Japan is supposed to build those. Japan never did, so the North surreptitiously began nuclear weapons work again.) But it did halt the North's development of nuclear weaponry for a few years. And yes, NK basically has practiced a policy of diplomatic extortion, using its nuclear arsenal as threat. Realistically one shouldn't expect the North to ever give up that arsenal, as without it it has no leverage. At best, perhaps a halt to its further development could be negotiated.

To be sure, the dynastic Kim regime is fanatical and unreasonable, but not wholly irrational. One good starting point for negotiations would be to propose a formal end to the Korean War by treaty. (There is actually just a truce in place.) However, the U.S. hates compromising with an adversary, especially one perceived as weak. This is why the U.S. prolonged the Vietnam War for so long, seeking "victory" (by pummelling the Vietnamese into submission). (Lyndon Johnson contemptuously likened North Vietnam to "a dwarf with a penknife" threatening the U.S.! There's the mentality you're dealing with.)

North Korea feels genuinely threatened by the U.S. Increasing that threat only increases the North's belligerence and determination to create a nuclear deterrent that can destroy not only U.S. bases in the Far East, but attack the continental U.S. The only strategy that has a chance to stop the development of North Korean ICBMs is negotiation and compromise, as distasteful as that is.

Nor should Trump count on China to bail out the U.S. China has expressed its strong objection to the THAAD anti-missile system the U.S. is preparing to deploy in South Korea, seeing it as neutralizing China's own missiles. Nor do they want to undermine the North Korea regime or bring it to its knees. It fears in that event that the South would take over the North, bring a U.S. client up to China's doorstep, and/or creating a flood of North Korean refugees into China (on top of the flow that already exists). (China has cancelled North Korean coal exports to China for this year, to express displeasure with North Korean missile tests. Oddly, it has been reported that bilateral trade has increased despite this. A real blow would be if China cut off oil shipments to the North. That would surely cripple the North's military. There is no indication China intends to go that far.)

But between a U.S. president who is ignorant, bombastic, blustering, narcissistic, and accustomed to getting his way through intimidation and bullying, and a U.S. military that is ascendant in the foreign policy arena (Trump has put generals in charge of the Pentagon and National Security Council, and diminished the role of the State Department, even proposing to cut its budget by 28%), it is hard to be optimistic about an intelligent strategy being adopted as U.S. policy. Not that the military necessarily wants war, but that after all is all they know how to do.

1] Overtly and covertly, the U.S. has used military and terroristic violence thousands of times in its history. Examples of economic warfare include against Cuba starting in 1959; against Chile from 1970 to 1973, when Nixon gave CIA secret police chief Richard Helms orders to "make the economy scream" to destabilize that country and overthrow elected socialist president Salvador Allende; against Iran since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979; 

Why the hell is this man laughing?

Rex Tillerson Is The Most Irrelevant Secretary of State Since William Rogers

 Rogers was Nixon's Secretary of State. Kept out of the loop, Nixon ran foreign policy himself with his henchman Henry Kissinger, a sycophantic brownnoser to power. Kissinger was Nixon's National Security Adviser until Rogers was tossed overboard and Kissinger became Sec. of State.

Nixon was a pathological creep who held his cabinet members in contempt.

I don't know if Trump holds Tillerson in contempt. He probably thinks he's better than Rex because he's richer (presumably). Tillerson has been nearly invisible. The top staff positions at State other than Tillerson are vacant. Trump is proposing to slash the State Department's budget by 28%- a huge downgrade.

Tillerson makes pronouncements that disappear almost immediately, like pebbles tossed into a pond.

For some reason, Tillerson refuses to allow the media to accompany him. Either he doesn't want to be observed, or Trump decreed this. On his current trip to Asia, he brought along on his plane just one pseudo-journalist, a propagandist who is designated to function as a shill. Two GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) operatives formed a fake "news" outfit a few weeks ago, and hired this young women with zero journalistic background or experience to pretend to be a reporter. She is the sum total of the "press pool" accompanying Tillerson in Asia.

Tillerson just made an empty threat to go to war with North Korea, employing the usual U.S. gangster lingo, the euphemism "all options are on the table." Except that war with the deranged, nuclear-armed North Korean regime would be an act of insanity. Aside from its nuclear weapons, the North Korean totalitarian cult has 10,000 artillery pieces aimed at Seoul, South Korea, the capital and commercial center of that nation. I don't think the South Koreans would appreciate having it obliterated.

But Tillerson has wasted no time in prnetsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt      oving himself truly loathsome. Since the bloodthirsty Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines last June on a platform of murdering "drug dealers an users," over 6,000 mostly poor Filipinos have been murdered in their homes and on the streets by Duterte's hit squads and independent "vigilantes." When pressed on this in Congress, Tillerson refused to condemn or criticize it.

See "Rex Tillerson Sets Off Alarm Bells in the Human-Rights Community," The Nation, January 12, 2017.

"I am NOT irrelevant, DAMN it!"