Author Archives: Wayne Madsen

As witnessed during Donald Trump’s recent attendance at the G20 Summit in Osaka and his side trip to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea, relying solely on the counsel of one’s daughter and son-in-law resulted in Trump displaying for the world his total ignorance of the fundamentals of international relations and geopolitics. Trump insisted on placing his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, on center stage in Osaka for the G20 conclave and at Panmunjom for a hastily arranged meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Ms. Trump acted as if she was on some sort of sorority house outing and was keen to impress her friends with inane statements that stepping into North Korea with her father was “surreal.” Continue reading →

For a nation that was founded by some of the most intelligent people who then lived on the planet—Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, to name but a few—the United States has plummeted into a new age, not one of enlightenment, but one of stupidity. Continue reading →

With ten minutes left to spare, someone prevailed on an amoral Donald Trump to call off the planned U.S. military attack on Iran. Trump later claimed that he did not want the deaths of 150 Iranians, the number estimated by the Pentagon who would have been killed in the pre-dawn attack, on his conscience. However, Trump has no conscience, so there must have been another reason. Continue reading →

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was recently castigated by the usual suspects after she likened U.S. southern border political asylee detention centers as “concentration camps.” AOC refused to back down from her description of the camps, which are even housing children separated from their parents in sub-human conditions. On June 8, AOC tweeted: “This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying. This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.” Continue reading →

Donald Trump has installed far-right Christian fundamentalist stalwart Ken Cuccinelli as acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Cuccinelli, a former Attorney General of Virginia and failed Republican candidate for governor of the Old Dominion, was appointed to his present position with the strong backing of Trump’s immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller. Continue reading →

The Donald Trump administration, aided and abetted by the Republican Congressional Conference, will go down in history as a regime of liars, grifters, dime store propagandists, common criminals, and schoolyard bullies. The evidence that “Team Trump” can and probably will lie the United States into a war with Iran, just as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied America into a war with Iraq, is seen in the latest tomfoolery regarding recent attacks on two tankers in the Gulf of Oman. The attacks follow by almost a month similar suspicious attacks on four ships at anchor in the Gulf of Oman, off the coast of the United Arab Emirates sheikhdom of Fujairah. Although Iran was blamed by members of the Trump administration for the May 12 attacks, no evidence was provided to bolster such claims. Continue reading →

It was like a day from the 1970s. Except the close encounter between a Russian SU-27 fighter-interceptor and a US Air Force RC-135V intelligence-gathering plane and a Swedish Gulfstream IV spy plane occurred on June 10. The incident, which occurred within Polish maritime airspace near the airspace of the Russian Kaliningrad region, resulted in diplomatic protests being lodged with the Russian Foreign and Defense ministries by the US embassy in Moscow. Continue reading →

The June 25-26, 2019 “peace conference” scheduled for Manama, Bahrain and attended by the United States, Israel, a few Palestinian quislings, and sell-out Arab states is nothing more than a rubber stamp on the future virtual annexation of the West Bank by Israel. The so-called “peace plan,” which has been dubbed the “deal of the century” by Donald Trump, had no Palestinian input, but was crafted by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump’s “special envoy” for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt, US ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and Kushner aide Avi Berkowitz. Greenblatt and Friedman were formerly lawyers for the Trump Organization. Continue reading →

The re-emergence of the feared Janjaweed paramilitary forces in Sudan should serve as a wakeup call for every American who supports democracy and the rule of law. The Janjaweed emerged in 2003 in the genocide committed in the western region of Darfur to deal with black African tribes that opposed the regime of General Omar al-Bashir. After Bashir later began to loosen his tight grip on power, the Janjaweed paramilitary volunteers faded back into their regular jobs. However, in April, Bashir was ousted in a military coup by a junta led by Lieutenant-General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and, more ominously, the Janjaweed commander, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, also known as “Hemetti.” Continue reading →

Donald Trump chose to spend the Memorial Day weekend hobnobbing with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a man who consistently honors his nation’s dead war criminals from World War II. Make no mistake about it, Abe is a right-wing nationalist and that is what makes him attractive to the racist Trump. Continue reading →

In the early 1970s, the Old Confederacy was reborn as the “New South.” Although Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” saw the old Dixiecrat Democrats embrace the Republican Party, a wave of moderate-to-liberal Democrats swept into governors’ mansions across the South. These included Jimmy Carter and Carl Sanders in Georgia, Terry Sanford in North Carolina, Reubin Askew in Florida, Albert Brewer in Alabama, Bill Waller in Mississippi, John West in South Carolina, and Ray Blanton in Tennessee. Even George Wallace, who returned to the Alabama governorship after a 1968 firebrand presidential run geared around segregation and an unsuccessful assassination attempt during his Democratic run for the White House in 1972, became known as one of Alabama’s most progressive and inclusive governors in the state’s history during his third and fourth terms in office. Continue reading →

Donald Trump fancies himself as a deal-maker. His foreign and economic policies, however, are more akin to those of a Mafia extortionist. At a minute after midnight on May 10, Trump hiked tariffs from 10 to 25 percent on $200 billion of Chinese imports. He also threatened a 25 percent tariff on the rest of the $325 billion of imports from China. Trump, who is as challenged in simple mathematics as he is with the English language, falsely tweeted that Chinese tariffs would be paid directly into the US Treasury. This statement was both comically and tragically wrong. Any increase in US tariffs on foreign goods are charged to the importer, which passes the higher costs on to the American consumer. Trump, in order to stoke his trade war with China, decided to hold the US consumers as hostages to higher costs for goods. Continue reading →

Relying on the advice of neo-conservative war hawk John Bolton, pompous Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Iran-Contra scandal felon Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump has embarked on the containment encircling of Venezuela. Trump is engaged in a fool’s errand of relying on the support of fascist leaders of Venezuela’s neighbors to pressure Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro to turn over power to a motley collection of Wall Street puppets who want to reverse the Bolivarian socialist policies of Maduro and his late predecessor, Hugo Chavez. Continue reading →

An unprecedented letter signed by over 720 nonpartisan and bipartisan former federal prosecutors and Justice Department career line attorneys states that Donald Trump’s conduct as president as described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report “would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.” Mueller cited current Justice Department guidelines in his decision to not indict a sitting president for obstruction of justice. The letter also serves notice on Attorney General William Barr that his conduct in representing Trump’s personal interests and not those of the American people violates a primary duty of the attorney general to carry out his oath and duties of his office. Continue reading →

Running for president of the United States has turned into a cash cow for several politicians. The reason is that the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which was created in 1974 to disclose campaign finance information; to enforce the provisions of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, including the limits and prohibitions on contributions; and to oversee the public funding of Presidential elections is all but out of business. Continue reading →

With former Bear Stearns executive David Malpass heading up the World Bank and one-time Goldman Sachs executive Steve Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury, Donald Trump and his coterie of grifters are in prime positions to plunder the wealth and natural resources of countries around the world. Both Malpass and Mnuchin are hedge fund managers. Exploitation of faltering national economies and buying up state-owned resources are a major specialty of hedge funds. Continue reading →

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 →