Prof. Gilbert Doctorow : Kremlin on Trump's Call for Ceasefire.

I wish more people would take a little time to understand these posts. On the ground we are battered with outrageous claims regarding government, our government's relationship with other countries, and the hyperbole regarding those relations casting East Asia or Oceania as 'enemies' that we cannon fodder should be prepared to die to destroy. These hyperbolic castigations are ineffective in jerking our strings and turning us into trench fill when we understand actual factual information about the interests of other countries' people and we American people.

There is never a case when the populations interests are divergent. The working families of one polity are the same as the working families of another, in terms of the needs they have and the challenges they face. Were neighborhoods in Tehran supplied interpreters and a Skype channel with which to coordinate policies with a neighborhood in Houston, they'd be largely consonant, with very few ideological differences, because ideologies aren't that important to having well functioning street networks, livable neighborhoods where children are safe, services available to supply goods like groceries, sundries, and materials to maintain and supply homes and the families that live in them.

Ideological, diplomatic, and military divergences come almost exclusively from the oligarchs that compete for resources to profit themselves by exploiting, mineral assets, verdant croplands, and populations that labor in them, are assets that oligarchs compete to possess, and in that competition we are the chips and cards they hold to build their hands they bet on between each other and the polities they control. That's why these analyses are valuable to ordinary folks, who don't compete with ordinary folks in other places, but rather could, and would, profitably cooperate with each other in developing trade, infrastructure, and local governance. It is the competition of oligarchs, and particularly the abuse of 'their' oligarchs, that abuses all populations.

Zelensky doesn't threaten you and I remotely as much as he threatens the Ukrainian population, and Pete Buttgieg doesn't threaten Muscovites as much as he does East Palestinian Ohioans, or folks in Alameda, CA. Because of this reality understanding the policies of these oligarchs as these analysts seek to do, enables populations to oppose policies that will be used to profit off their deprivation, labor, and families being transformed into cannon fodder. Destruction of agencies like USAID, NED, CIA, and other psyops generators are in the interests of not only the poor sods in far off countries the population of Peoria, IL has no interest in deceiving, but the population of Peoria, IL that is taxed to pay for their deception and weaponization against oligarchs in that far off country.

Did we generally just pay attention to these analyses, we'd better guard ourselves from that parasitism and predation by which we are monetized by oligarchs, turned into cash cows that fund their Gulfstream G5's and holidays in Cambodia.

Thanks!