The government of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley was shocked when the Trump administration seized over 150 ventilators ordered and pre-purchased by Barbados from five different foreign sources. Although Barbados Health and Wellness Minister Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bostic said there are no shortage of ventilators in the country to deal with its current level of Covid-19 cases, the seizure by the U.S. has resulted in icy relations between Barbados and the United States. Continue reading
Contrary to ruminations from far right-wing Republicans, including Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as fundamentalist crackpot Jerry Falwell, Jr., that COVID-19 involves either a willful or accidental biological warfare operation set in motion by China or North Korea, the facts are that the deadly virus involves no military or intelligence service. The fact that every military and intelligence service on the planet has been negatively impacted and severely hobbled by the virus is evidence that there are no strategic military winners and only losers with respect to the pandemic. It is Donald Trump’s senior Republican officials and evangelical supporters who are pushing such nonsense that COVID-19 is a biological warfare attack. It is proof of the paucity of any level of military or intelligence expertise in the Republican Party and the Trump administration. Continue reading
The City of Destiny in Apopka, Florida [right] is a de facto entertainment complex for the weak-minded and gullible. It is neither a theme park nor a cinema multiplex. The City of Destiny is one of several megachurches across the United States that always takes advantage of people during a major threat like the COVID-19 pandemic to fleece their congregations and lure into their grips the fearful. Continue reading
The Age of Enlightenment had a pretty good run from the 17th to 19th centuries. It led to the Industrial Age and, in concurrence, the Space and Information Ages. These historical epochs advanced humanity to crowning breakthroughs in science, medicine, information exchange, and quality of life. Today, all of humankind’s advancements are being threatened by those who would have society return to an age marked by superstition, belief in magic and miracles, ignorance, racial and religious intolerance, and abject sexism. Continue reading
Impeached President Donald Trump has completely bolloxed up America’s carefully thought-out contingency plans that deal with pandemics. In addition to lying about the number of Americans infected with and being treated for the COVID-19, or coronavirus, Trump’s attrition of professional staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) in Atlanta; the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland; and the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), a division in the Department of Health and Human Services, has ensured that the administration, unlike its predecessors, was ill-prepared to deal with a national and global health emergency. Trump’s federal hiring freeze has ensured that key vacancies resulting from retirements at the CDCP, NIH, PHS and other key entities have gone unfilled. Trump also disestablished pandemic response teams within the National Security Council, which was headed by Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, and the Department of Homeland Security. Continue reading
U.S. right-wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, to whom Donald Trump recently awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor usually bestowed upon those who have markedly improved society in some way, recently suggested that the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, was nothing more than the “common cold” that was “weaponized” by opponents of Trump to use it against him in this year’s election. Such pandering to those on the lunatic fringe who oppose modern science and medicine, including vaccinations, is not limited to the radio airwaves. Continue reading
The crowing by Donald Trump that he “terminated” the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, Major General Qaseem Soleimani, simply because Trump believed, mobster-style, that he had it coming, should remind the world that the United States government stands as the world’s record-holder in either directly carrying out or coordinating with other parties the assassination of political leaders, American and foreign. Continue reading
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution still echoes the dire warning Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered in a January 13 speech. The speech, titled “The Restoration of Deterrence: The Iranian Example,” set forth a new policy of deterring “threats” to American interests by carrying out future political assassinations like that of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Al Quds Force commander Major General Qaseem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at Baghdad International Airport. Pursuant to this same new policy, the chief treasurer for the Quds Force, General Abdul Reza Shahlai, narrowly escaped assassination in Yemen by American military forces. Continue reading
In the 2016 science fiction sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence, actor Jeff Goldblum, describing the targeting priorities of aliens invading the Earth, says, “They like to get the landmarks.” In both Independence Day and its sequel, movie viewers were treated to scenes of macabre-looking extraterrestrials destroying the Empire State Building, the White House, Los Angeles’s Tower Records building, and London’s Tower Bridge and “the Eye” wheel. Continue reading
Throughout his military command of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ elite Quds Force, the late Major General Qassem Soleimani ensured that Iran had as its disposal an intricate network of military proxy forces, sympathetic Shi’a Islamic faithful, and armed wings of foreign political and religious allies prepared to respond to an American and/or Israeli military attack. With the Donald Trump administration’s assassination of Soleimani and Iraqi Shi’a militia leaders, all of whom were popular in Iran and Iraq for helping to defeat the Saudi/Israeli-supported Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, the Iranian retaliatory network established by Soleimani stands at a hair-trigger response to the U.S. premeditated murders. The network of Iranian proxies and allies crafted under Soleimani’s guidance—mostly non-state actors but with a few state players—will be Soleimani’s everlasting legacy in future history books on the Middle East and strategic warfare. Continue reading
Propaganda disguised, sometimes believably, as actual news. Age-old religious teachings being transformed into the dogma of political cults. And now, historical facts being discarded and replaced with alternate chronicles of humanity’s past. Such is the nature of information warfare now being waged by political hucksters, hoaxers, and hustlers on a global scale. Never before have the basics of primary, secondary, and collegiate education been more important in guarding against the whimsical fantasies and alternate realities of politicians like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Boris Johnson, and others in their mold. Continue reading
It was less than five years ago that U.S. troops in Iraq were coordinating with Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani and members of his elite Al Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attacks on the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq. The Al Quds Force is the foreign expeditionary arm of the IRGC. Continue reading
The two major political parties, the Conservatives and Labor, are mere shadows of their former selves. Fresh from a major landslide victory in England, the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is now a hard-right party. Traditional Tories like Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, and Kenneth Clarke, the grand old man of Conservative Party politics, were expelled as members of the Conservative ranks sitting in the House of Commons as a result of their September 2019 vote against Johnson’s government and their pro-European Union positions. With Johnson’s December 12 election victory, backing for Johnson’s Conservatives has come from such far-right stalwarts as Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage and the Britain First movement of neo-fascist street hooligan Tommy Robinson. Continue reading
Donald John Trump has turned back the clock in the Western Hemisphere to an era that saw coups and political unrest as the order of the day. Trump and his administration of far-right anti-socialists and pro-fascists have already overthrown the democratically-elected government of President Evo Morales of Bolivia. Trump has announced a policy of turning up the heat on President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela by ratcheting up the economic blockade of Cuba, a Venezuelan ally. Continue reading
Future historians, if they exist, will look back in amazement at the leaders of three nations in particular. The leaders—Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and US President Donald Trump—not only ignore, but criticized and question solid scientific data that the planet is in extreme environmental danger of a global catastrophe. Making matters worse, these leaders continue to advocate for damaging measures—coal burning, rainforest destruction, and fossil fuel vehicles—that worsen the extinction-level peril to humans and most other living things on the planet. Our future historians will discuss whether the political leadership of the early 21st century was driven by some crazed religious desire for “specicide” of the human race, as well as other species. Continue reading
The world is currently mired in massive malfeasance in office by senior government officials, including heads of state and government, who are more interested in personal gain than in government service. Mixed in with financial and political scandals in dozens of nations is the specter of some government officials being involved in illegal sexual activities with underage individuals. Continue reading
There is a rather vocal sector of the so-called “progressive left” that has decided it is best to tolerate Donald Trump and his administration’s fascist policies. This is mainly because Trump has made a few narrowly-focused decisions that the pro-Trump “left” happens to support. The Trump decisions that have enamored the faux left include the much-ballyhooed “withdrawal” of U.S. military forces from Syria—actually, some of those forces remain in-country—as well as trash talking NATO and U.S. bilateral military alliances with South Korea and Japan. Continue reading
The recent coup d’état in Bolivia that overthrew President Evo Morales was not merely a standard right-wing putsch aided and abetted by the US Central Intelligence Agency but also placed into power politicians affiliated with a rising fundamentalist Protestant movement in Latin America that can be termed “Christo-fascist.” Many of the far-right and out-of-the-mainstream Protestant sects that have gained power in Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, and, now, Bolivia have decried traditional Roman Catholicism in Latin America as heretical to their religious ideology and even pro-Communist. As for mainstream Protestant religions, the fundamentalist sects view them as hopelessly liberal, as well as heretical. Continue reading
Donald Trump, who has a schoolboy’s view of Native Americans as having been “savages” who besieged wagon trains of “peaceful” European settlers, has chalked up on his record of seedy deeds the military overthrow of Bolivia’s first Native American president, Evo Morales, an ethnic Aymara. Trump has been eyeing Morales, the leader of Bolivia’s Movement toward Socialism (MAS) party, for some form of retribution ever since Morales scolded Trump in person during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on September 26, 2018. Continue reading
Not content with the annual November observance of National Native American Heritage Month, which has been promulgated by every president since George H. W. Bush in 1990, Donald Trump issued a proclamation, published in the Federal Register, also naming November as “National American History and Founders Month.” The White House observance of November to honor the white European settlers who initiated the genocide of the Native American peoples in North America fits into Trump’s championship of white nationalist causes and further erodes his relationship with America’s tribal nations and communities. Continue reading
Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, which most people get wrong in trivia contests, may soon be in the headlines around the world. What Republican state Senate President Robert Stivers said about the close gubernatorial election that saw Democratic Attorney General Andrew Beshear edge out a close victory over Republican incumbent Matt Bevin, a Trump loyalist, should normally shock the nation. But in the era of Trump, taking non-democratic actions to maintain political power is the new reality. Continue reading
A year ago, the corporatists and anti-socialist militarists in the Donald Trump administration appeared ecstatic over the electoral successes of neo-fascism in Latin America. Jair Bolsonaro, a self-proclaimed admirer of Adolf Hitler and who is nicknamed the “Trump of the Tropics,” sat in the presidential palace in Brazil; billionaire right-winger Sebastian Pinera had, once again, become president of Chile; and Lenin Moreno, the one-time leftist and progressive ally of former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, had invited the US military back into his country and made common cause with the Lima Group, an anti-Nicolas Maduro bloc subservient to Washington. Continue reading
Historically a cipher and pass-through for the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been transformed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at the urging of Donald Trump, into an aggressive business intelligence operation designed to financially benefit Trump’s top donors in private industry. USAID is a component of the U.S. State Department and is officially tasked with managing U.S. foreign assistance programs, mostly in developing countries. Continue reading
The revelations that businessmen tied to Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash and other foreign interests funneled campaign cash into the coffers of several Republican Party politicians, including the president, senators, U.S. representatives, and governors is like a case of déjà vu. In 1940, the United States first began to take seriously foreign cash donations to U.S. political campaigns in the months preceding the U.S. entry into World War II. Continue reading
One of the tropes Israel and its international phalanx of lobbyists has used since the state’s inception in 1948 is that “Poor Little Israel” requires Western money and diplomatic support because the small country is surrounded by hostile Arab countries. Neither of these contentions have ever been true. Continue reading
Donald Trump, who believes everything that is real is fake and everything that is fake is real, has delved into another academic discipline for which he believes he is an eminent expert. After promulgating his own fake weather forecasts, political opinion polls, and news, Trump has now proclaimed his own fake history. After abandoning to invading Turkish forces the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) forces, who have been allied with US Special Forces battling the Islamic State caliphate jihadists in Syria, Trump stated, “They [the Kurds] didn’t help us in the World War II, they didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.” Continue reading
By Donald Trump’s own admission and through documents provided by an Intelligence Community whistleblower and former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine Paul Volker it is known that the Trump administration pressured at least four countries to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The countries identified as being involved in the Trump operation thus far are Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Australia, and China. The attack on the Democratic Party’s leading presidential candidate in 2020 is far worse than that carried out by Richard Nixon henchmen G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, Donald Segretti, and Charles Colson in the Watergate scandal and events surrounding it. Continue reading
There are several correlations currently being made between the current move by the US Congress to impeach Donald Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors and a similar action that resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon as a result of the Watergate scandal. However, there is a major difference between then and now: The Internet and the dissonant cacophony of polemics from non-journalists whose sole goal is to muddy the informational waters with far-out conspiracy theories and libelous prose. Continue reading
With a dangerous right-wing and quasi-fascist administration in power in Washington, one that rejects internationalism and consensus-building, it is past time for the United Nations to move its headquarters and member states’ permanent missions to a more neutral location. One can understand why the UN was originally located in New York. The Rockefeller family donated the land on Turtle Bay on the East River for the construction of UN Headquarters. After World War II, the United States was in a prime position to nurture the UN, something it failed to do after World War I when Washington rejected membership in the League of Nations. Continue reading
In July 2018, White House leaks indicated that Donald Trump gave his personal mobile phone number to various foreign leaders. Although Trump is known to have phoned some foreign leaders over his official White House landline, he is also known to call some leaders using his mobile phones on a whim and while some of his calls’ recipients, in Asia, for example, are asleep. Trump is also known to use multiple cell phones to call foreign leaders. Criminals, including narco-lords and drug smugglers, often use multiple “burner” phones in the hope they can evade detection and eavesdropping by law enforcement. Continue reading
The Central Intelligence Agency, founded largely by a bunch of self-entitled graduates of America’s Ivy League universities and alum of secretive fraternities – particularly Yale and the Skulls and Bones — appears to be re-indulging in some of its worst antics of the Cold War years. Many CIA plank owners joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, a convenient way for them to avoid combat and killing Nazis, for whom they had some ideological sympathies. Continue reading
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The pandemic’s toll on federalism
Posted on April 2, 2020 by Wayne Madsen
The coronavirus pandemic has had a deadly toll on the world’s population. However, the pandemic has also seen another, collateral, victim. Various forms of federations, where a central executive should provide an equal safety and health umbrella over all of the constituent parts of the federal entity, have seen the centers shirk their responsibilities and either failed to act for the nation as a whole or played favorites with certain member constituencies. Two of the most egregious failures of federal structures during the pandemic have been two countries led by megalomaniac far-right conspiracy-believing presidents, namely, the United States and Brazil. Continue reading →