The Donald Undone: Tilting at the Swamp, Succumbing to the Empire

 By David Stockman

December 09, 2018 "Information Clearing House" 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50730.htm

You can’t build the Empire and drain the Swamp at the same time. That’s because the Swamp is largely the fruit of Empire. And it’s also the reason that the Donald is being rapidly undone.

Indeed, it is the Empire’s $800 billion national security budget which feeds Washington’s vast complex of weapons suppliers, intelligence contractors, national security bureaucrats, NGOs, think tanks, K-street lobbies, so-called "law" firms and all-purpose racketeers. It’s what accounts for the Imperial City’s unseemly and ill-gotten prosperity

Trump, US, Saudi Arabia, and Iran

Part of an interview with Noam Chomsky, by David Barsamian on tomdispatch

Barsamian: Trump’s first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia. What significance do you see in that, and what does it mean for broader Middle East policies? And what do you make of Trump’s animus toward Iran?

Chomsky: Saudi Arabia is the kind of place where Trump feels right at home: a brutal dictatorship, miserably repressive (notoriously so for women’s rights, but in many other areas as well), the leading producer of oil (now being overtaken by the United States), and with plenty of money.