There is a reason why buffoonish political leaders like Donald Trump can get away with attacking the news media. Unlike the print and broadcast journalists who covered Watergate and Iran-Contra, many of today’s, mostly cable news reporters and editors, cannot even get basic facts about geography, political systems, and other fundamentals correct. President Richard Nixon never called his media critics “stupid,” because Nixon and his gang understood that they were up against a professional and very well-informed news media. Similarly, in the Iran-Contra scandal, the news media, including the emergent Cable News Network (CNN), covered the scandal with the intuitiveness and tenacity expected of the reporters, editors, and bureau chiefs. Continue reading →
In a blatant attempt to unravel the bloc of Venezuela’s Caribbean allies formed nurtured by Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chavez, Donald Trump and his foreign policy team of neo-conservative war hawks has accomplished to divide the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to a degree not seen since 1983. That year saw President Ronald Reagan order the US invasion of CARICOM member Grenada, an event that saw CARICOM split on supporting the move. Among the CARICOM members, Bahamas, Belize, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago opposed the US invasion, while other states either participated in the military occupation of CARICOM member Grenada or voiced support for it. Continue reading →
When an incompetent US president hires as his “special envoy” for regime change in Venezuela the very same buffoon who fumbled his way into helping to expose the Iran-Contra scandal, one can expect anything. Continue reading →
Under the directorship of torture and black site maven Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s Central Intelligence Agency has returned to its traditional roots of conducting “black bag” operations and disrupting electrical grids through cyber-attacks. Continue reading →
Forget Russian oligarchs for the time being. Donald Trump and his family appear to have been co-opted by a standard Chinese intelligence operation—both mainland and Taiwanese—that uses overseas Chinese, shady dummy corporations, prostitution and blackmail, and political influence peddling to influence foreign governments. Continue reading →
The city of Miami, Florida, may have started out as a retirement mecca for winter-worn pensioners from northern climes. However, after the beginning of the Cold War and US military and Central Intelligence Agency intervention in Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Guyana, the Bahamas, and other Western Hemisphere nations, Miami became a refuge for exiled wealthy businessmen escaping populist revolutions and elections in South and Central America, and spies. The retirement and vacation capital of the United States quickly became the “Tropical Casablanca.” Continue reading →
Expect more VIP heads to roll in Florida’s statewide crackdown on a chain of “day spas” that provided their male clientele with sexual gratification instead of body massages. The arrest of hundreds of men, including three wealthy retirees living on Florida’s “Treasure Coast,” followed quickly on the heels of a decision by U.S. Judge Kenneth Marra of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami that the 2007 non-prosecution agreement plea deal agreed to by then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, Assistant U.S. Attorney A. Marie Villafaña, Palm Beach County state’s attorney Barry Krischer, and attorneys for Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was “illegal.” Donald Trump appointed Acosta as his secretary of labor, a position over which Acosta is responsible for identifying breeches of federal law against human trafficking, including sexual exploitation of foreign or domestic laborers. Continue reading →
A largely ignored story reported by the Lebanese magazine “Ash Shiraa” on November 3, 1986, soon blossomed into a major scandal involving the covert sale of US weapons to the government of Iran and the illegal supply of weapons to right-wing Nicaraguan rebels. The Lebanese magazine was the first to reveal that the Ronald Reagan administration was covertly selling arms to Iran in exchange for the release of seven American hostages by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon. Continue reading →
The hiring by CNN of Sarah Isgur Flores, a longtime Republican Party hack and former spokesman for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as the political director for the 2020 campaign should not surprise anyone. Lest anyone point to MSNBC as having more sense than CNN, it is noteworthy that Isgur also interviewed at 30 Rockefeller Center, NBC News headquarters in New York, for a position there prior to accepting the one at CNN. For a Donald Trump puppet, someone who gladly signed a loyalty pledge to Trump before accepting the political director’s job at CNN—a network Isgur has previously called the “Clinton News Network”—points to the degradation of broadcast news to nothing more than mindless infotainment and political insider navel gazing. The cable news networks and their money-losing broadcast cousins at ABC, CBS, and NBC are totally governed by ratings and not what’s in the public interest. For those who believe PBS is a safe haven, its Corporation for Public Broadcasting now counts Trump loyalists and contributions from the Koch Brothers among its many journalistic sins. Continue reading →
Donald Trump displayed his full neocon colors on February 18 during a speech at Florida International University in Miami. With convicted Iran-contra felon Elliott Abrams now acting as his “special envoy” in charge of overthrowing the Venezuelan government of President Nicolas Maduro, Trump urged Venezuelan military officers to rise up in a coup d’état and oust Maduro, who Trump called a “Cuban puppet.” Continue reading →
The Trump administration, now rife with regime change advocates and neocon firebrands like John Bolton as national security adviser, Elliott Abrams as the “special envoy” for Venezuela, as well as Tea Party/neocon hybrid Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, is backing regime changes in not less than five countries. The chief champion for regime change in Vice President Mike Pence, who has toured Latin America looking for allies for the neocon geopolitical cause. Most of Trump’s regime change targets are in Latin America. Continue reading →
Howard Schultz, the billionaire founder of Starbuck’s, the over-priced coffee chain that enthralls some deluded progressives by requiring them to speak a bastardized version of Esperanto when ordering a cup of coffee, believes he should be the president of the United States. As if the country can withstand another callous billionaire born in New York City in the White House, Schultz, who is flogging a book, revealed that he is considering an independent run for the presidency in 2020. Many political observers believe that Schultz, like Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016, will siphon votes from Democrats and, thus, ensure a second term for Donald Trump. Continue reading →
The Trump administration’s January 23 recognition of Venezuela’s National Assembly leader, Juan Guaidó, as the president of Venezuela, in opposition to the “de facto” and “de jure” president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, threatens an avalanche of nations recognizing leaders of various political factions in countries around the world as legitimate governments. In reaction to Trump’s move, Maduro severed diplomatic relations with Washington and ordered all US embassy personnel in Caracas to leave the country within 72-hours. Venezuela’s opposition-controlled National Assembly declared a caretaker government as a rival to the Maduro government with Guaidó as the interim president. Continue reading →
Somewhere along the line in recent history, some US think tank in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency must have come up with the idea that overthrowing governments in Latin America by military coups came with bad optics for the coup plotters. Often, democratically-elected Latin American leaders were demonized by a cabal of military officers who left their barracks and laid siege to the presidential palaces. After taking control of the national radio stations, these generals would announce they had seized control of the government to “protect” the people from “communism” or some other concocted bogeyman. Continue reading →
What was purported by the Trump administration to have been widespread illnesses of US diplomats in Cuba resulting from the use—by some nefarious state actor—of advanced acoustic warfare weaponry, turned out to be caused by the mating calls of crickets. In response to accusations that a sonic weapon was targeting US personnel in Cuba, the Trump administration withdrew half of its staff from the US embassy in Havana and expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from their embassy in Washington, DC. During 2017, some 26 US diplomats complained of nausea, headaches, vision problems, cognitive disorders, and other maladies brought about by a high-pitched drone sound they experienced at their homes and hotels. Continue reading →
Fascist-ruled Honduras and Guatemala—the latter the home of 7-year old asylum-seeker Jakelin Caal, who died in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents—will soon be joined by El Salvador as a major refugee-producing Central American nation. Continue reading →
The December 1 arrest by Canadian authorities in Vancouver of Huawei Technologies chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, based on a US extradition warrant, represents a draconian extraterritorial application of a dubious US law and claim of Huawei’s sanctions violations regarding Iran. Meng was arrested at Vancouver International Airport, while a transit passenger changing planes. Continue reading →
Trump and his neocons have withdrawn from so many international organizations and agreements that his foreign policy has earned a shameful nickname: “the Withdrawal Doctrine.” Continue reading →
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.—Nearly a decade of vexatious civil litigation in Palm Beach County court between convicted underage sex molester Jeffrey Epstein and Fort Lauderdale trial attorney, Bradley Edwards, who represented pro bono many of Epstein’s victims, concluded rapidly on December 4 after Edwards’s attorney, Jack Scarola, announced an out-of-court settlement between Epstein and Edwards. Under the terms of the agreement, termed a “surrender” by Epstein, a confidential financial settlement was reached in favor of Edwards and an apology by Epstein to Edwards for wrongly suing him in an effort to “damage his reputation” and divert attention from Epstein’s victims. The Epstein suit was designed to force Edwards to abandon Epstein’s victims, including Courtney Wild, formerly known only as “Jane Doe 1,” who was recently identified in a three-part series on the Epstein case in The Miami Herald. Continue reading →
The rumored nomination of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta as attorney general in the wake of Jeff Sessions’s firing is apparently what spurred the Miami Herald to publish a detailed 3-part series look at the sweetheart plea agreement worked out by Acosta with convicted child molester and Donald Trump’s close friend Jeffrey Epstein. The Miami Herald story resulted in a public rebuke for the story’s reporter, Julie Brown, from former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, who appears to have taken over as Trump’s “muscle” to attack journalists who investigate Trump and those tied to him. Continue reading →
Trump’s ‘Drang nach Suden’
Posted on March 26, 2019 by Wayne Madsen
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Germany had their dreams of “Drang Nach Osten,” a German push to conquer the lands to the East—Poland, the Baltic nations, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine—to acquire space for German colonists (“Lebensraum”) while enslaving or committing genocide on the Slavic peoples. Continue reading →