A lot of ignorant American twaddle that uses Sth Korean and US websites as data about the North Koreans military capability. In the first place China has a military alliance with Nth Korea since 1961. Just as the US claims it has a military obligation to assist its puppet state Sth Korea (which it occupies like Japan) so too has China a like obligation to assist Nth Korea; which it didin 1950 after the Yankees refused to heed repeated warnings about invading the Nth. Second China and Nth Korea, Iran and Russia share military technology and have for decades (before and after Putin). Also the tech to build nukes and missiles is much more advanced than that used to build tanks, subs or aircraft. Most of Sth Koreas airforce are US F15-16s and F4s. All are 30+ years old and the F4s over 45 years old. None are new but mere upgrades of obsolete designs. The South is dependent on the US for all its ordinance save for some modern indiginous tanks, ships etc. It is not super equipped nor more modern than the North. Mere hubris and US propaganda. No nukes could be used (as none were in the 1950s or in the Vietnam War). Why? Because Russia and China would come in at once. Which is why they were not used. Further, to destroy Japan (a tiny Island with no resources) the North would send cruise missiles (unstoppable as they hug the sea/ground) with fuel air explosives. One would destroy (vaporise) an area of several square kilometers. The target would be the myriad offshore Japanese electricity grids that serve several mega cities. Thus no electricity, no power for lighting, frigeration, no sewerage, no pumped, filtered drinking water. In ten days the city would die and in Tokyo’s case 30 million inhabitants would have to be evacuated. Japan has 56 nuke power stations on/near its coasts. A few missiles on these and several Fukushimas all at once. So much for the idiot scenerio above. Read some real military sites bozo instead of All-American ones designed for the local rednecks Trumpites. China could overrun all of Asia in mere months and the US could do nothing! They have 40 cities with a million or more inhabitants; thus 40 nukes would destroy the US. Mutually assured distruction is all this would mean which is why nothing has happened in 70 years. So the US would have to fight a conventional land war in Asia and even the biggest American stooge could believe they would win.Why they can hardly hold Iraq, a third world nation. This stuff makes me laugh as it is so irresponsible; a mere pipe dream Hollywood style.

Whitney needs to read the economic policies of Mussolini and Hitler during the hight of the Great 1930’s Depression. The fascist economies recovered FIRST from the economic western world meltdown, It emulated Keynesian policies in structure but not in exact detail. Obviously Whitney is not cognizant with the theorys of the Corporate State (Mussolini 1934) where by a three large Councils (regulated economy with a mix of free enterprise, government imput, controlled labour. While not exactly the same system, Trump is moving in this direction and it can well work; but only if China and Russia cooperate in the exercise. As a pseudo-leftist liberal Whitney ignores the Trump attitude to American wars conducted by neocons under the guise of promoting democracy, feminism in other countries. An ideological means to justify imperialist attack on others, in the same display of cultural arrogance the British Empire once displayed with its White Mans Burden doctrine last century. All now renamed as Democratizing nations as the US is the one exceptional, indispensible people! Naturally Trump will have to curtail the bloated US military with its 1100 overseas military bases, its 70% funding of NATO’s annual budget. The billions saved here can be directed to the rebuilding of the US infrastructure. Jobs then have the Keynesian detonator effect in the economy. expanding economic activity twenty fold for each dollar invested. Under the fascists Big Business controlled the finances under plans set up by Govt. The detail today is marginal. America always was Fascist with its Democracy a sham as both parties are the same in essence. Germany and Italy also had multi parties under fascism. All with the same policies of course. Just as todays western political systems are much the same. Neo-globalism was a means of stealing the world by Imperialist war, hidden under the banner of political Liberalism. No different in substance to all 19-20th century wars. In fact since 1945 America has conducted some 157 wars and coups; even one in Australia against Whitlam govt in the 1970’s. Whitney has always lived uder fascism, its just that its methods have changed, less direct. To survive Elites will do anything, including changing its social mask, but keeping nationalism and racism when needed. Whitney and his kind paved the way for this fiasco due to liberal/left policies over the last 40 years and the abandonment of the Marxist alternative. Why be suprised? To survive Trump and Co must control the Fed, take control from the one % of family oligarchs and stop the private (five family owned) banks from printing money from thin air charging usurous interest. They must cancel the $20 trillion debt as unpayable; issue a new currency (as one of a basket of currencies) for world trade. This means a huge drop in the American military establishment and spending which reduces risk of world war; at least in the short/mid term. Killery would have started a war within months according to RT. Trump is not alone; he is a developer and makes money via rents and property development, he is supported in this by manufactures; this class is opposed to the military-industrial complex that works via war and plunder of ruined nations. This tiny ten % are insane and have alienated support around the western establishment and population. Austerity and war is never popular especially in harsh economic times. So it is the 1930’s all over again. What we need is old style Marxist-Leninist populalist parties (class orientated) as the only alternative. But liberals like Whitney and pseudo-Anarchists like Chomsky do not see it this way. It is intellectuals like them (plus the Greers) who have led the Left to this situation. Now the old traditional Left is Right and the traditional Right act Left. Whats new? Did not Hitler and Musso claim they were socialists? The Left need to get a brain and re-read the old ‘Marxist classics with new.class-orientated eyes! We deserve what we get!

Mr Saker is at it again; posing as a critic of Western Liberalism while utilizing its values in his article re maxisms, assumptions and ideology. It appears Mr Saker knows nothing about philosophy or indeed Russian history; and nothing at all about so-called Democracy and its historical origins. For his edification I point out the following facts:
(i) The British Empire invented the myth of Democracy in the mid nineteenth century; the reason being to fool the emerging working class movement and co-op them into supporting the growing/expanding British Empire. The White Man’s Burden where the ignorant nignogs and dark/yellow skins needed enlightened British (Western) Institutions to guide them to cuivilization from darkness. This is pure bull shit! A two party system began in Britain by chance when Henry VIII seized the Catholic Church lands, made himself head of the English Church. He did this on a pretext of a divorce, In actual fact he was bankrupt and had debased his currency having squandered some 7 million pounds accumulated by his skinflint father Henry Tudor (the real killer of the princes in the Tower). Henry VIII sold off a third of the best land in England to the highest bidder, bought largely by merchants (later knighted over time) thereby creating a propertied/monied class equal to the old landed aristocracy. This power base later became the Parliamentary forces who disposed Charles I after a Civil War. It ended the ancient Divine Right of Kings after James II. The Whigs came from this group which led to the Labor Party on the back of the later Trade Union movement. A property qualification was needed in the early days of Democracy (women had no vote) to qualify for Parliament. Needless to say economics was separated from this process and still is.
(ii) Ancient Greece was a slave society and some 1500 city states tried forms of so-called Democracy over a 500 year period. It was an oligarch of land owners who voted among themselves re who could rule society. The rulers were all property owners. Tradesmen, slaves and women had no say. Only 10% or less had any imput in how society was run. Thus the truth is Democracy only existed for a class… the ruling class; the rest had no powerat all. It is a myth of class propaganda around the world. So cultural imperialism is the basis of this rot. Pray tell Mr Saker, how can a social system in which the wealth is owned by 1%-10% of the population be a Democracy? Political elites are all million/billionaires in the West and elsewhere; is this representative of the great majority? Of those whose labour is owned (as wage slaves) by the monied classes? Do you think a billionaire will give away their wealth if they lost a vote in their own institutions? Genius! Sheer genius!
(iii) Saker bemoans that the NeoCons are anti-democratic and are really Bolsheviks! This is ignorance of the first order and a blatent lie. Real communism is the polar opposite to the Clinton/Bush/Obama imperialists. Leninism is polar opposite of this world view; elementary reading shows that Capitalism moves from Democracy to Fascism when the system starts to collapse due to usury and lack of surplus value accruation. Capitalism’s history is Boom-Bust and has been for three hundred years. Wars enable capital to revamp itself and survive as a class system. (class a word Saker hates and avoids like the plague) There is no such thing as Democracy Mr Saker, for economics is separated from politics. Therein lies the decite of it all and there lies the rub. Only Lenin’s Democracy of a new class type is real democracy for the masses; not so-called representation or multi-parties. Nazi Germany had multi parties but all had the same policies, militarism, property rights and basic economic forms (Corporate State–highest stage of capitalism). Sound familar? Like the multi-national system of corporate America today. In short a political structure with an attendant ideology; but Mr Saker enshews ideology, thinking liberalism and his nonsense about individual liberty is not an ideology. This when all systems are ideological at base, especially in the attitude to private property, or public property or mixed economy.
I could go on; but it is obvious in my piece that the Saker is a Liberal shrill of the American school, he thinks personal freedom really exists! (how are we free in a class world of scarcity?) Only the property classes have relative freedom but the masses are slaves to the owners of labor! Again the word that Saker avoids like the devil. Class and class division is ignored like a typical ideological bourgeois. Saker then is a wolf in sheep’s clothing but poses as an independent thinker! Independent of what when all his core values are Western liberalism with all its attendent myths and hypocracy!

As per usual Saker exaggerates American imperial power. To my mind he is an American shrill in liberal guise. Investigation shows most of his many assertions on international politics are dated to the era of US military ascendency some two decades ago. There is no way a feeble disunited NATO can match Russia militarily and the US is a decade or more behind Russia in missile systems and electromagnetic warfare technology. Further any war with Russia would immediately involve China, Iran and Nth Korea to name only a few Russian allies. This the Saker ignores thus illustrating the unreality of his geo-political world-view. It would be the West that would be outmatched qualitatively and quantitatively as its military is tired, worn and over-extended with new equipment inventories lagging behind, as the F35 lemon shows. Any war will be nasty, brutish and short for all concerned. And nothing of the Empire would remain at the end of it.