Kerry traveled to discuss the rising urgency of environmental change to the Mekong Delta. Changing climate and enhanced erosion and sedimentation of the Mekong from upstream dam projects are now Kerry’s target of political opportunity. According to the Associated Press, Kerry has pledged $17 million to a program that will help people and the economy adapt to environmental changes in the region.

Keeping to form as a high-ranking state official, Kerry says he’ll work to ensure that none of the six countries that share the Mekong (China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) will over-exploit the river so other populations suffer. Calling out China (which has plans for numerous dam projects along the Mekong) Kerry stated: “No one country has a right to deprive another country of a livelihood, an ecosystem and its capacity for life itself that comes from that river. That river is a global asset, a treasure that belongs to the region … The Mekong must benefit people not just in one country, not just in the country where the waters come first, but in every country that touches this great river.”

Crafty rhetoric, but governments will not protect natural resources. Nation-states work as rational actors to advance their own self interests and expand their power, largely through exploitation of natural resources. There is an inherent conflict of interest among states — the state with the most territory has the most resources for consumption. States will not share a territory or resource for too long. This is why war (be it military or economic) is the health of the state — it provides a monopoly over a territory and thus its resources.

Kerry, the US government, the Chinese government, any government will only enhance the complex wicked problems facing the world today. Progress, development, growth and industry are the objectives of states. States and their supported industries are rapidly using up the world’s natural resource base, especially water, to enhance their own power. It is the name of the game. Nation-states are large, bloated structures that require tons of resources — they will never protect the environment.

Free people will develop alternative federations and institutions to protect resources, however. It happens every day. People are becoming more aware of what burdens their societies. Education and awareness of public and environmental health are fostering concern for natural resources. Though markets are still largely controlled by the corporate state, liberation is coming. Contrary to the state, the liberated market, controlled and crafted by free human beings, will build the sustainable communities of tomorrow. Indeed, only in a liberated society, with no political boundaries, will human civilization realize its relationship with the environment.

History has been a dramatic race between state power and social power. Social power is growing. Human beings are connected like never before. Free people are building voluntary institutions that are rendering state monopolies useless. Freedom is back! May the old order soon be nothing but ashes. Our sustainability depends on it.

Hopefully CNN will try extra hard to sanitize the war footage from Syria once the bombing starts, now that we know how badly dead Syrian kids upset Kerry. Because you can be sure there are a lot more dead Syrian kids on the way.

Of course, Kerry’s sensitivity to dead children is a bit like Carter having a problem with liver pills. This is the same John Kerry who served in Vietnam, and who backed two attacks on Iraq and one on Afghanistan, is it not? One of the most iconic images in the history of journalism is a little girl, naked and burning, running down a Vietnamese road after a chemical weapons attack by the United States. And the US all but condemned Al-Jazeera as a terrorist organization for airing images of Iraqi children incinerated in the American attack in 2003.

For that matter, US “redlining” of a country for using chemical weapons is also a bit odd. In the same press conference, Kerry spoke of holding Iraq accountable for violating international, historically established norms. But the US itself has quite a history of violating such norms. In WWII, for instance, the U.S. holds pride of place not only for the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, but for being the first and only military power in history to burn hundreds of thousands of civilians alive with atomic weapons in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As for chemical weapons, aren’t Agent Orange and napalm — the liquid fire used on that screaming little girl mentioned above — supposed to count? The cumulative effect of US chemical weapons use in Indochina is millions dead during the war in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — and millions more dead of cancer and genetic defects in the decades since.

While we’re on the subject of chemical weapons, the story just came out — at about the worst possible time for the US, as it’s rolling out its propaganda for another war — that the US actively aided Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in targeting Iranian troops with nerve gas. It was known for some time that the Reagan administration had shared intelligence with Iraq at the same time it was using chemical weapons in the Gulf War. But it turns out Washington was supplying intelligence in full knowledge that that intelligence would be used to identify Iranian troop concentrations for targeting with nerve agents. Iran was preparing for the strategic exploitation of a huge hole in Saddam’s defenses, which might well have turned the tide of the war and led to enormous Iranian gains at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, increasing military pressure on Kuwait and other Arab Gulf states.

The overall American policy arc in Iraq from the ’80s on seems to be: 1) Help Saddam to make war on his neighbors; 2) help Saddam use weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors; 3) encourage Saddam to invade Kuwait; 4) bomb the hell out of Saddam in 1991 for invading Kuwait and making war against his neighbors; 5) bomb the hell out of Saddam in 2003 for possibly still having weapons of mass destruction.

In short, the United States simply does not give a rip about Saddam, Assad, or anyone else using chemical weapons or committing war crimes of any kind. The US routinely supports regimes that engage in war crimes — and then publicly condemns them for war crimes only when they stop taking orders from Washington or otherwise become a liability. War crimes by official enemies are just a propaganda point for selling wars to the public.

Consumer advisory: Don’t buy a used war from this man.

Sounds kind of backward, doesn’t it? From protests to petitions, publicity campaigns to meetup schedules, the Internet has become the preeminent tool of political organization in the two decades since the World Wide Web debuted. The advance of technology has involved more people in political action, and more effectively, than anything before it. It substantially enables us to govern ourselves in far more effective — and far more consensual — ways than Kerry and the gang he works for could ever hope to.

But, of course, that’s not what Kerry means by “organization” or “government.” As a foot soldier of the political class, he uses those terms to mean putting the people he rules into lockstep motion in physical, mental and financial support of goals set by and for the state (the only “common interest” he recognizes). He’s happy to let us color the picture, but only so long as he gets to draw the lines we color within. And he takes comfort in the knowledge that other states will manage similar feats among their own subjects, reducing the number of real players in global polity and economy to a few political class representatives and simplifying the task of shearing billions of sheep.

The Internet is, from that perspective, his worst nightmare. It erases political borders and lets people living under the rule of different states mingle, discuss, debate … and agree … and organize … and act … with no need for approval or permission from the world’s John Kerrys or Barack Obamas or Vladimir Putins or Adly Mansours.

Kerry’s lamentation isn’t the first such, nor will it be the last: The American and global political classes recognize fast, cheap communication between their subjects as the death knell for their own tenuous grip on power. The bloated, bureaucratic, hierarchal, snail-paced organizations on which states rely are no match for the distributed, networked, ad hoc organizations that the world’s masses can put together in hours and adapt to changing circumstances in minutes.

That’s why the worm has turned in terms of state-to-state tutelage.

Back in the 1980s, the politicians of comparatively liberal states like the US encouraged “constructive engagement” with more oppressive states like South Africa and the People’s Republic of China. More talk, more trade, we were told, would encourage those states to “liberalize.”

These days, it’s the alleged “liberals” who envy — and increasingly attempt to emulate — things like the Great Firewall of China and Mubarak’s ability to shut down the Internet in Egypt.

Given the choice between a totalitarian state and no state at all, people like Kerry will choose the former every time. And that is always the ultimate choice — not just for him, but for us as well.