A plot by pro-Trump militants to kidnap the Democratic Governors of Michigan and Virginia, Gretchen Whitmer and Ralph Northam, respectively, points out the degree to which the United States has fallen into Latin American “banana republic” status. The assassination of state governors and other local leaders in Latin America have become so commonplace, the actions receive barely a mention in the U.S. media. Continue reading
Several of the founders of the United States were gifted scientists and scholars of the Age of Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a statesman, but he was known as one of the leading scientists of the world in his own right. Franklin, who had to deal with his age’s numerous religious extremists, medical quackery, and various misanthropes, would have little time for the anti-science foolishness of the Donald Trump administration. In fact, taking the political appointee sector of the Trump administration as a whole, the United States enjoyed more scientific expertise in government during its early days than it does today. Continue reading
Israel may view the United Arab Emirates as one of its few allies in the Arab World. However, the UAE’s embrace of Israel does not enjoy universal support in the seven emirates that make up the oil-rich federation. One of the constituent emirates, Ras al Khaimah—sometimes referred to merely as “RAK”—has had a stormy relationship with the chief emirate in the unequal federation, Abu Dhabi. Israel and the Donald Trump administration may believe that the UAE is part and parcel of the Washington-Jerusalem security bulwark against Iran, but Ras al Khaimah has always marched to its own beat from the very inception of the UAE in 1971. Ras al Khaimah initially balked at becoming a member of the UAE and was technically independent between December 2, 1971, the date that Britain gave independence to the UAE—what was formerly known as the Trucial States—and RAK’s rather reluctant incorporation into the UAE on January 10, 1972. Continue reading
There’s a fairly good chance that most Americans know at least one person, including family and close friends, who have become followers of the wacko Qanon fringe conspiracy cult. Extremist cults have plagued America in the past. What makes Qanon so different from the Manson family, People’s Temple, Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, Raëlians, and NXIVM is that they were relatively smaller groups and were concentrated in certain geographical regions, for example, Southern California, Oakland, Texas, West Virginia, and New York state. Qanon, on the other hand, has a wide following across the United States and, increasingly, around the world. Qanon, which maintains underpinnings of white supremacy and neo-Nazism, is a sect within the larger Donald Trump cult of personality. Continue reading
The impeached U.S. president, Donald Trump, has taken a step never attempted by any of his predecessors. Trump, who every day is exposing his fascist policies and intentions, has announced that he is establishing a “1776 Commission” to re-write American history and force-feed it to every public and certain private school students throughout the United States. Trump’s move is intended to counter the 1619 Project of the New York Times, which is designed to place slavery and the slave trade in a central context in dealing with the history of pre- and post-colonial America. Continue reading
Not content with referring to the 200,000 Americans who have perished from Covid-19 as “virtual nobodies,” Donald Trump has a particularly damaging surprise in store for senior citizens. Trump’s category of “nobodies,” who he classed as “elderly people with heart problems and other problems,” are going to see costly rises in Medicare and Medigap costs in 2021. Once considered an essential component of Trump’s base, senior citizens are fleeing away in droves from Trump, particularly in key states with large numbers of retirees, including Florida, Arizona, and Texas. Continue reading
The U.S. political class of pundits, pollsters, columnists, and endless cable news blathering talking heads are currently putting forth the notion that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is having a problem with support from the Hispanic community. This argument is based on a disingenuously false premise that the Hispanic community is a political monolith that is gravitating, as it has in recent years, to Republican candidates. To be sure, there is a conservative base to the Hispanic vote among the mostly white European exiles in South Florida, who came to the United States to flee, along with their offshore bank accounts, socialist and progressive governments that came to power after overthrowing Central Intelligence Agency-nurtured dictatorships of “caudillos” in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Continue reading
Attorney General William Barr is less independent of aspirant dictator Donald Trump than Nazi Germany’s first Justice Minister, Franz Gurtner, was of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Barr has systematically turned the Justice Department into a political weapon designed to protect Trump from the Congress, the courts, and individual U.S. citizens exercising their rights under the Constitution. Barr has trashed the rule of law that has ensured that America’s system of democracy has prevailed since the birth of constitutional government. Continue reading
The only benefit from the rise of neo-fascist leaders in heretofore democratic nations is that the various fascist, neo-Nazi, racial and religious supremacists, and far-right terrorists have reared their ugly heads to the degree where it is now easier to identify them and their circle of contacts and organizations. When the United States, Brazil, Colombia, Poland, Turkey, and other similarly afflicted nations return to political normalcy, the forces of the far-right, already self-identified, can be rolled up, stripped of their weaponry and access to the Internet as threats to public safety. These resurgent Nazis can also be subjected to ridicule and shamed by the general public to the point where they recede from politics and return to their subterranean lairs or be prosecuted and imprisoned for their crimes, which include mass murder and other acts of terrorism. Continue reading
The Republican Party, founded in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854, is dead. The “Grand Old Party” as it was known has become a full-blown cult of personality vanity organization beholden to only one person, Donald Trump. National presidential nominating conventions have historically featured the rolling out from convention platform committees the party plank addressing such issues as foreign policy, social security, defense spending, education, health care, the environment, and other factors. The virtual Republican convention this year issued no such plank, a first in recent memory. Instead, the Republican Party issued a statement in which it notified members that there would be no new plank until the 2024 convention. In the meantime, the Republican Party’s plank is whatever Trump says it is. Continue reading
Donald Trump’s assault on the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is an assault on the national sovereignty of the United States. By bolloxing up the postal system to interfere with voting in this year’s election and a reliance on voting by mail during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has done more than severely damage a critical national infrastructure. The U.S. Post Office is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as a protected government service. The Postal System is not a business and was never meant to be one. It is a service provided by the federal government to its citizens. Continue reading
Although Donald Trump’s presidency is well-known for its antipathy toward the press, one of the main targets for Trump’s ire was Spy magazine, which was published from 1986 to 1998. Spy’s editors, Kurt Anderson and Graydon Carter, set an editorial policy for its many articles on Donald Trump and his New York social life that referred to the real estate magnate as the “casino operator from Queens.” That got under Trump’s skin because he believed he had become a member of Manhattan’s royal elite and did not deserve to be connected to “working class” Queens. When Spy wasn’t dishing on Trump by describing him as a shady casino owner from Queens, it referred to him as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” further setting off the short-tempered egotist. Continue reading
The release of a report by the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), billed as the Donald Trump administration’s “dedicated center for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda, cites the Strategic Culture Foundation in Russia, Canada’s Global Research Center, and other online publications as “proxy sites” for Russian intelligence and the Russian Foreign Ministry. The State Department’s report is titled, “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem” and it is not much different than the series of reports issued by the State Department’s “International Information Program” in the mid-2000s that were used to debase U.S. journalists and authors critical of the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney neo-conservative wars of choice. Those diatribes, like the recent one masquerading as a “special report,” were written on the U.S. taxpayers’ dime and represent a squandering of money. Continue reading
Donald Trump’s pathological racism, which he displays every day, has hampered international efforts to stem the spread of COVID-19. Trump’s insistence on using terms like the “Chinese flu” or “China flu” to describe COVID-19 is merely designed to stoke tensions with China and, by default, between Trump’s racist white nationalist base and Asian-Americans. Worse is Trump’s use of the blatantly racist “kung flu” to denote COVID-19. Continue reading
Donald Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Nazism and Adolf Hitler. After neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Trump called them “fine people.” Trump’s first wife, Ivana Trump, wrote that one of the only books Trump kept readily available was a compendium of Adolf Hitler’s speeches. According to Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, Donald Trump was raised in a household of constant racist and anti-Semitic words and deeds. Continue reading
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues its deadly march around the world, a number of relatively dormant conflicts, as well as several well-known flash points, stand ready to place the world on the edge of a major armed conflict. History shows us that during times of stress—economic depression, religious strife, vacuums of political leadership, and public health crises like that which is now plaguing the world—the chances for war increase commensurately. Continue reading
In 1979, United Nations Committee on Human Rights rapporteur Abdelwahab Bouhdiba cited the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia as an example of “autogenocide,” the carrying out or enabling of mass deaths among one’s own nation. Previously cited examples of genocide at the time Bouhdiba coined the word autogenocide, were Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The former’s genocide of Eastern European Jews, Romani, Slavs, and other non-Germans also included German Jewish and other citizens, making it a practitioner of both genocide and autogenocide. The genocide of Chinese by Japanese military occupiers fit the broader definition of genocide. Continue reading
Likability is a trait that politicians across the political spectrum seek to achieve during their careers. Achieving popularity among the masses requires empathy and rationality, two elements that politicians of the right-wing, many of whom believe they are “populists,” lack. With the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, an overwhelming majority of those political leaders who have seen their popularity rise are those who cared more for the health and safety of their constituents than in the value of stock market shares. Continue reading
As the world contends with the deadly pandemic of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, the Chinese embassy in the Kazakhstan capital of Almaty has issued its citizens a warning about an unknown pneumonia that has seen a spike in infection cases since last month. The novel pneumonia spikes are in Atyrau and Aktobe provinces and the city of Shymken. Continue reading
The University of Pennsylvania was founded in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin in 1740 to serve as a center of liberal arts education to train the next generation of colonial American leaders in commerce, government, and public service, three disciplines that were never mastered by one of the university’s graduates, Donald Trump. In fact, according to the information provided in the blockbuster book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” by Dr. Mary L. Trump, Trump’s niece and a clinical psychologist, the University of Pennsylvania should invalidate Trump’s Bachelor of Science degree in Economics because Trump paid a friend, Joe Shapiro, to take his college admission SATs. A sharper mind than the simpleminded Trump, Shapiro’s performance on Trump’s SATs earned Trump admission into Fordham University for two years and a follow-on transfer to Penn. Continue reading
The U.S. State Department annually publishes an extremely biased report on human rights around the world. Conveniently, the report omits one of the most systemic violators of human rights on the planet. Under Donald Trump, the United States has graduated from systemic human rights violator to human rights pariah, as witnessed by recent murders and assaults by police of innocent people on the streets of America. Although the United States has historically been more than willing to criticize the human rights policies of other countries, including in the venue of the United Nations, it has bristled at attempts to have brought forth in the international body its own human rights outrages. Continue reading
John Bolton’s long-awaited book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” which Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr have attempted to suppress under the color of national security law, contains some very noteworthy quotes from others in their conversations with Bolton before and during the time he was Trump’s National Security Adviser. One thing is clear about the book. Bolton uses his “kiss and tell” offering to justify a boatload of discredited neoconservative policies directed against anti-imperialist nations, from Venezuela and Cuba to Iran, China, and North Korea. Bolton’s book is nothing more than a Heritage Foundation foreign policy white paper sprinkled with juicy tidbits exposing Trump and the coterie of back-biting criminals and jesters who surround him. Bolton spent a lot of ink on his favorite topics, including neocon regime change as seen in his photo with a veteran of the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Continue reading
History has always treated harshly those tyrants and strongmen who have been gratuitously violent toward their subjects and citizens and believed in purposely creating misery for their charge. Donald John Trump, the third impeached president of the United States, decided to clear peaceful protesters gathered a full block from the White House, so he could have his photograph taken standing in front of a church. It was not any church, but St. John’s Episcopal Church, dubbed the “Church of the Presidents,” owing to the several chief executives who have worshiped there over the decades. Continue reading
George W. Bush political dirty tricks and battleground state election rigging mastermind Karl Rove has been enlisted by the White House and the Trump re-election campaign to assist in a strategy to overcome presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s consistent lead in the polls. Rove, who, in 2016, called Trump a “complete idiot” and “graceless and divisive,” only to later meet with Trump at casino tycoon Steve Wynn’s home in Manhattan, has been in regular contact with Trump presidential adviser Jared Kushner and Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. Rove attended a White House meeting last week with Trump and key Trump advisers. On the agenda was cutting Biden’s lead in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona. Continue reading
Across the globe, as scientists and doctors are working a breakneck speed to develop safe vaccines and therapies for the COVID-19 virus, modern-day magicians and voodoo purveyors are pushing all forms of quackery to swindle and sway an unsuspecting public. The most notorious wizard of woo is Donald Trump, who, on February 28, said of COVID-19, “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” Continue reading
The post-COVID international geopolitical structure may resemble that which followed the most lethal pandemic that affected the world—the highly contagious Black Death of the 14th century. The bubonic plague killed between 75 and 200 million people in Asia, Europe, and North Africa. It is believed the bubonic/pneumonic plague was carried by black rat flea parasites that travelled to Europe and the Middle East first via the Silk Road from China and then on Genoese merchant ships sailing from Crimea. The fleas spread from their rodent hosts to humans. An eerie connection to COVID-19 is that among the first victims of the Black Death were 80 percent of the population of Hubei province, including the town of Wuchang, present-day Wuhan. Continue reading
Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special assistant in charge of everything and his “Stupid Rasputin,” Jared Kushner, has made his move. Kushner, who favors a return to economic normalcy during the Covid-19 pandemic, does not feel the same about the November 3 election. Continue reading
Falun Gong, the Central Intelligence Agency-linked Chinese cult, which is banned in China, has achieved overarching influence in the Donald Trump White House, State Department, and among Republican Party stalwarts harboring ambitions for national office. The cult’s newspaper, The Epoch Times, enjoys access to White House press conferences and is currently engaged in a campaign to cast blame on China for the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading
There are growing signs that the coronavirus pandemic will radically alter the geo-political map of the world. The governors, prime ministers, premiers, chief ministers, and administrators of sub-national governments have been almost unanimous in decrying the lack of support from central governments during the current COVID-19 crisis. Not least among these have been the governors of the American states of New York, Michigan, Washington, and other states and U.S. territories. Continue reading
The world will not soon forget the despicable nature of the Trump administration during the worst global pandemic since the 1918 flu. Trump, aided and abetted by a rogues’ gallery of misfits, hyper-xenophobes, and egotistical homosexuals, has all but ruined any good will the United States still maintained in the world prior to the coronavirus outbreak. Continue reading
Throughout the world in countries that elected right-wing anti-government libertarian leaders—from the United States and Brazil to the United Kingdom and Australia—incompetence and lack of preparedness for the Covid-19 pandemic will directly lead to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. The political rhetoric of those leaders who practice “barbarian laissez-faire” policies have been exposed by Covid-19 as worthless pablum designed to enthrall their unthinking supporters. Continue reading
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No need to pack the Supreme Court, just unpack it
Posted on October 16, 2020 by Wayne Madsen
Democrats who are fretting over Amy Coney Barrett—the creepy Aunt Lydia clone from “The Handmaid’s Tale”—becoming the sixth right-wing justice on the U.S. Supreme Court are suggesting that a Joe Biden administration use its constitutional prerogative and add additional members to the court in an effort to restore jurisprudential equilibrium to the court. There is another solution to returning balance to the nation’s highest court that does not entail “packing.” Continue reading →