The continuing infestation of America’s body politic by neoconservatives is resulting in some noted war hawks taking full advantage of President Donald Trump’s lack of a clear-cut US foreign policy to push for something the neocons and their Israeli puppet masters have long desired: a two-front war against North Korea and Iran. Continue reading
Add another violation of federal law to the growing potential rap sheet that may be brought against Donald Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and other members of the Trump and Kushner business organizations: violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977. There is a growing mountain of evidence that Trump, Kushner, and their associates may have offered rewards, including Oval Office access to potential foreign investors in Trump and Kushner properties. Continue reading
The Central Intelligence Agency is no stranger to “moles” feeding highly-classified intelligence to outside parties. The Cold War and subsequent years saw moles within the CIA being ferreted out by U.S. counter-intelligence officers. However, what is unprecedented is the fact that the current CIA director, former Kansas Tea Party Republican Representative Mike Pompeo, is suspected by CIA counter-intelligence officials of conveying critical intelligence on certain key CIA operations to Donald Trump and his close associates, including Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. It is well known that Kushner and his ex-con father, Charles Kushner, enjoy close relations with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Mossad. Continue reading
There are intelligence indications and warnings that President Trump’s “troop surge” in Afghanistan may also include the deployment of U.S. special warfare troops to the Indian side of the Chinese border. Currently, Indian and Chinese troops are facing off in a dangerous game of brinkmanship in three regions of the Himalayan range: the tri-border Dokalam Pass between China, the Indian state of Sikkim, and Bhutan; the Lipulekh Pass between the Indian state of Uttarakhand, Nepal, and China; and the Pangong Lake area of Ladakh in the territory of Kashmir, sovereignty over which is disputed between India, China, and Pakistan. The Pangong Lake stand-off resulted in a rock throwing spree between Chinese and Indian border troops last week. Continue reading
The modern Republican Party can always be counted upon to inject its brand of racist politics into any natural disaster. Hurricane Harvey, which has brought about a 1,000-year epic flood in northeast Texas, is no exception. No sooner had pictures emerged from the Houston area of flooded homes and stranded residents on rooftops, the GOP spin machine, egged on by conspiracy hate monger websites, the most prominent being located in Texas, began laying blame on elected and appointed Democratic officials. Continue reading
There are reports that ousted White House chief strategist Steve Bannon wants former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to testify to Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller on the chain of events that led to President Donald Trump firing FBI director James Comey. Bannon is apparently aware that it was Kushner and First Daughter Ivanka Trump that convinced the president to fire Comey at a family get-together at Trump’s Bedminister, New Jersey, golf club this past May. According to a Vanity Fair article, presidential aide Stephen Miller, who has cultivated a close relationship with Kushner, was also at the Bedminster meeting. Continue reading
James Bond creator and British intelligence agent, Ian Fleming, famously wrote “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” Robert Ludlum’s fictional spy, Jason Bourne, said, “Coincidence is rarely a factor.” Continue reading
There is increasing chatter among mostly European diplomats that their nations’ displeasure about President Donald Trump would best be shown by staging a diplomatic boycott, namely, recalling ambassadors in Washington and leaving only chargés d’affaires in charge. This type of measure has been used in the past to show opposition to the domestic and foreign policies of foreign governments. Recently, Saudi Arabia led such a boycott, albeit for spurious reasons, against Qatar. Many nations have recalled their ambassadors to Israel following moves by that country against Palestinians. Continue reading
The mass media is being used by the neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate movements to give greater exposure to far-right leaders like Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler, Jack Posobiec, Preston Wiginton, and the most recent self-outed Nazi, broadcaster Alex Jones, to mainstream them and their dangerous ideology. This is similar to the methods used by Adolf Hitler to increase his exposure from a few beer-and-urine-reeking halls in Munich to all of Germany. Continue reading
The Trump administration and its spokespeople have dusted off many sordid relics of America’s past and now colonialism can be added to the Trump “rap sheet.” Not content with calling for the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which would abolish the direct election of U.S. senators, and dabbling in Jim Crow policies with a regressive civil rights policy, the Trump administration nominated as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas San Diego businessman and early Trump supporter Doug Manchester. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Manchester called the independent Commonwealth of the Bahamas a U.S. protectorate. On July 10 of this year, the Bahamas celebrated 44 years of independence. Continue reading
The pro-Israeli Zionist “brain trust” Donald Trump has named to be his guiding force on Middle Eastern policy, plunged Trump into one crisis, the Saudi/United Arab Emirates blockade of Qatar, and almost into another, Trump’s moronic criticism of Lebanese Hezbollah, while standing next to the Lebanese prime minister who owes his job to the Shi’a organization. Trump takes his Middle East advice from principally his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a contributor to and member of the board of the “Friends of the IDF,” an American non-profit that raises funds for the Israeli armed forces. Continue reading
An investigation of President Trump’s current and past business dealings has revealed that the real estate tycoon has effectively served as a syndicate “Godfather” for some three decades. In 2009, when Ivanka Trump married Jared Kushner, the scion of the Kushner real estate family, the marriage was more of a business merger between the Trump and Kushner business empires. The title of “Godfather” of the sprawling Trump-Kushner real estate empire fell to Donald Trump with Kushner Companies founder Charles Kushner, the father of Jared, racking up a federal criminal record for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering, and Jared taking over the reins of the firm. Continue reading
The continuing infestation of America’s body politic by neoconservatives is resulting in some noted war hawks taking full advantage of President Donald Trump’s lack of a clear-cut US foreign policy to push for something the neocons and their Israeli puppet masters have long desired: a two-front war against North Korea and Iran. Continue reading
Justice Department Special counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury in Washington, DC that could be looking into Donald Trump’s complicated but suspicious financing of his businesses, as well as his presidential campaign. The U.S. Senate has recognized the gravity of the grand jury probe of Trump and his campaign and White House advisers by maintaining the body in “pro forma” session throughout the August recess. The move prevents Trump from firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replacing him with a recess appointee who could fire Mueller. Continue reading
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has appointed as a 16th investigator on his team a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn who helped prosecute a number of gangsters who also invested in properties owned by Donald Trump. Continue reading
Two investors in Donald Trump real estate properties, Soviet Jewish emigre and Brooklyn conman David Bogatin and Kazakhstan Trio member Alexander Mashkevich, a Kazakh-Israeli national and notorious oligarch, figure in two suspicious deaths. Continue reading
Not even during the darkest days of the Watergate scandal has the political and career government staff of the Executive Office of the President been gripped by the fear that has resulted in normal business grinding to almost a dead stop. The internecine warfare that has broken out between competing factions of the White House staff has resulted in the odd scene of many young political staffers bolting the White House grounds to alleyways, aisles well inside stores like CVS, and back tables of Starbuck’s and other coffee shops to commiserate over cell phone calls with colleagues, friends, and family members about their own longevity in their jobs. Continue reading
The US Department of Defense is fond of issuing reports, many of which contain a massive amount of Pentagon jargon and gobbledygook terms. But, one recent report, while not lacking in typical gibberish, contains one clear and unambiguous message. The neoconservative “New American Century” pet project, which saw the United States engage in quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as an unending “global war on terror,” is dead and buried. Continue reading
Strongman President Donald Trump has floated the idea of firing Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller if the former FBI director crosses a “red line” and delves into the financial practices of Trump and members of his family. However, the president cannot escape current and reportedly planned investigations of money laundering pursued by non-federal entities, including state attorneys general. Even if Trump pardons members of his family, including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for “all past and present crimes,” presidential pardon power only applies to federal criminal charges, not those brought by the states and, definitely, not criminal indictments by foreign legal authorities. Continue reading
In a July 19 audio-taped interview with three reporters from The New York Times, a paper that has been disparaged by strongman President Donald Trump as a failing business reporting “fake news,” Trump had harsh words for the entire upper echelon of the Department of Justice. Trump lambasted Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the “Russia probe” and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for being a secret Democrat from “Baltimore.” Trump also attacked Special Counsel Robert Mueller, former FBI director James Comey, and acting FBI director Andrew McCabe. Trump made it clear that he would have not chosen Sessions as his Attorney General had he known he would recuse himself from Russian investigatory matters. Continue reading
During the time that U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster were reviewing the U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, The New York Times ran a story on July 10, 2017, that exposed a threat that will upend U.S. defense strategy and return it to a bitter past. Continue reading
Ever since the dawn of modern telecommunications, the American public has been guaranteed by law certain inalienable rights. The law that established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Communications Act of 1934, enshrined for all Americans the principle of universal access to communications services. Subsequent laws have expanded universal access from telephones to other services, such as high-speed Internet. There is a particular right of universal access to communications for those living in rural and insular areas, and low-income Americans. The other FCC law that guaranteed Americans the right of access to the communications conduits of the public commons, in this case, the public airwaves, was the Fairness Doctrine of 1949. The doctrine required holders of public broadcast licenses to provide honest, equitable, and balanced views of public importance. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine in order to please the wealthy GOP donors who owned various media conglomerates. Continue reading
U.S. strongman Donald Trump’s comments and tweets, which have blasted the “fake media” and “fake news,” have endangered journalists across the United States. In combining the unique powers afforded by the presidential “bully pulpit” to every American president since Theodore Roosevelt, who coined the phrase, with the “lying press” (lügenpresse), verbiage favored by Adolf Hitler, Trump has rallied to his side some of the most unsavory political activists and bottom-feeders seen in the United States since the days of the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Continue reading
Ask most scholars on the U.S. Constitution and they will tell you that the Constitution prohibits American states from seceding. They will point out that the U.S. Civil War settled the issue of secession in fact, as well as in theory. But all the constitutional principles considered does not prevent the United States from devolving from the political center’s authority in Washington, DC, to the state and even large metropolitan levels. Continue reading
The right-wing Christian-owned store chain Hobby Lobby has settled a federal case that saw the Oklahoma City-based crafts retailer fined $3 million for illegally importing stolen artifacts from Iraq for “the Museum of the Bible” the store’s owner, Steve Green, is building near the National Mall in Washington, DC. Oddly, the title of the civil asset forfeiture case, brought in the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of New York, does not mention the 600-store Hobby Lobby chain or Green as the major culprits. Had the case been criminal, as it should have been since Hobby Lobby violated a 1990 law on trafficking of Iraq, the case would have been United States of America v. Hobby Lobby, Inc. Continue reading
Even before its recent “redesign,” which was claimed to provide an “uncluttered” look, Google News was one of the worst news aggregator sites on the Internet. Many longtime Google News users have complained about the site’s quality and dubious “news” content. Google has offered no reasonable explanations for its poor business decisions that have resulted in Google News being a repository for misleading news links. Keeping in mind that Google received its initial seed investment from the CIA’s IN-Q-IT, now known as IN-Q-TEL, the agency’s venture capital firm in the Silicon Valley, the CIA may be playing some sort of massive social network experiment on Google News users. Continue reading
U.S. strongman Donald Trump in a nepotistic fashion has granted his son-in-law Jared Kushner special diplomatic envoy portfolios to deal with the Middle East, China, Canada, and Mexico. Kushner, who is 36 and has no international experience, except for acting as a virtual embedded agent for Israel and Binyamin Netanyahu in the United States, recently warned Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to understand his place after the normally soft-spoken Tillerson blew up at a White House meeting with chief of staff Reince Priebus, Kushner, and their aides. Continue reading
A powerful neocon cell is calling U.S. foreign policy shots in the Trump White House. Neocon describes those who put the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States. Continue reading
U.S. Navy sources report to WMR that the Navy is heading into familiar cover-up mode in the official investigation of the collision of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) with the ACX Crystal, a Philippines-flagged container ship manned by a Filipino crew of 20. The collision, which killed seven U.S. Navy sailors who drowned in a flooded below-water line berthing compartment, took place near Japan’s Izu Peninsula on June 17 at 2:20 a.m. local time. The Crystal was under charter to a Japanese firm, Nippon Yusen KK (NYK), and was en route from Nagoya to Tokyo. The Crystal’s registration holder is Sinbanali Shipping, Inc. based in Manila, and its actual owner is Dainichi-Invest Corporation of Kobe, Japan. Continue reading
Ever since the end of World War II, the United States, rightly or wrongly, but most of the time wrongly, has fancied itself as the “world’s policeman.” Even a disastrous and costly military intervention in Southeast Asia did not deter the United States from acting as the chief arbiter of what governments were “in” and which were “out” as evidenced by the Central Intelligence Agency interloping in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Haiti, and Colombia. Two military interventions in Iraq and a U.S.-led military campaign directed against Yugoslavia were not enough to pry the United States from its self-appointed role as the chief “global cop.” In fact, American neoconservatives continued to fanaticize about the United States leading the world into a post-Cold War “new American century.” Continue reading
In the wake of Georgia’s 6th U.S. House district Democratic Party hopeful Jon Ossoff’s loss to Donald Trump-endorsed Republican Karen Handel, Democrats are crying in their cups of Starbuck’s latte and chai. In what was the most expensive House races in American history, Handel beat Ossoff by 3.8 percentage points. Continue reading
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Closing Russian mission in San Francisco slaps a rich cultural history
Posted on September 7, 2017 by Wayne Madsen
The decision by the Trump administration to order the Russian Consulate-General closed within 48-hours is not only a violation of the 1964 Soviet-American Consular Convention but a slap at the rich Russian cultural history of San Francisco and northern California. For the Trump administration to boot a fully-functioning consulate-general, busy issuing Russian visas to U.S. citizens and permanent residents and renewing Russian passports of Russian citizen permanent residents and dual citizens in the United States, is as much an act of a tin pot dictatorship as was the U.S. visa ban imposed against seven predominantly Muslim nations and the decision to deport from the United States some 850,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) registrants after they were promised a road to permanent residency and citizenship. Continue reading →