Australia is sleep-walking into a confrontation with China. Wars can happen suddenly in an atmosphere of mistrust and provocation, especially if a minor power, like Australia, abandons its independence for an "alliance" with an unstable superpower.

The United States is at a critical moment. Having exported its all-powerful manufacturing base, run down its industry and reduced millions of its once-hopeful people to poverty, principal American power today is brute force. When Donald Trump launched his missile attack on Syria -- following his bombing of a mosque and a school -- he was having dinner in Florida with the President of China, Xi Jinping.
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As I pointed out back in July of 2015, U.S. Senator Bernie Senator (“I”-VT) is not the independent left politician many progressives claim he is. He’s a Democratic Party company man.

That was been clear from his long Congressional record of voting with the neoliberal, dollar-drenched Democrats and accepting their seniority-based committee assignments. It was clear when he came out to Iowa City in December of 2014 to give a speech so focused on the terrible Republicans that a professor had to remind him that corporate and imperial Democrats are a problem too. It was clear when he decided to the run for the U.S. presidency as a Democrat and promised to back the Democrats’ eventual nominee (Hillary Clinton). More

Those 59 missiles, launched as Trump dined on chocolate cake with the Chinese president, had an almost aphrodisiacal affect on the liberal press. Ecstatic op-eds gushed forth from papers coast-to-coast, as if they'd been pre-written just waiting for the moment to hit the upload button. An analysis of the top 100 daily papers by Andy Johnson of FAIR showed that 47 papers ran editorials on the bombing of Syria. Thirty-nine of these columns were fervently in favor, seven struck an ambiguous tone and only one, the Houston Chronicle, emphatically opposed the strikes. That's an 83 percent approval rating from Trump's former "enemy of the people." Call it love at first strike.

The war-weary public, however, remained much more skeptical. An ABC/Washington Post poll conducted by Gallup showing that 51% supported the strikes, while 40 percent opposed them. It's now the role of the press to browbeat the 40 percent into submission. More