The Safari Club, formed by the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, Israel, France, Iran, Egypt, and Morocco in 1976—with a “wink and a nod” from the Central Intelligence Agency—was responsible for much of the West’s clandestine operations against the Soviet Union in conflict zones extending from Afghanistan to Somalia and Angola to Nicaragua. It is ironic that a group of intelligence agencies and guerrilla groups supporting the Houthis in Yemen is now taking a page from the old Safari Club to combat against the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and their proxies in Yemen, the Horn of Africa, and the greater Middle East. Continue reading →
Gallup surveyed in 134 countries in 2017, and on January 18 reported that: Median approval of U.S. leadership across the 134 countries surveyed in 2017 reached 30%, the lowest point since Gallup began tracking this measure annually in 2007. Disapproval of U.S. leadership increased almost as much as approval declined. The 43% median disapproval, up 15 points from the previous year, was a new record as well, not only for the U.S. but for any other major global power [there were three others—Germany, Russia, and China—that] Gallup asked [this question] about in the past decade. Continue reading →
After the Donald Trump administration’s decision to recognize the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv, the national aspirations of the Palestinian people to live in their own state have been severely dashed by Washington’s move. Ever since the formation of the United States, it has been American policy to destroy aspirant nations like the internationally recognized State of Palestine. Continue reading →
Nothing has changed. Continue reading →
The first time when it became clear to me that I live in a dictatorship was in 2014 when reading, prior to its publication, the landmark (and still the only) scientific empirical study to address the question as to whether or not the United States federal government is, authentically, a democracy—or, whether, alternatively, it’s instead more of a dictatorship, than a democracy. This study documented conclusively that America’s government is the latter. Continue reading →
Donald Trump is a corrupt, dishonest capitalist. So, why isn’t he liked by the moguls of Wall Street? Why did they support not only Barack Obama, but Hilary Clinton? Continue reading →
U.S. President Trump’s bold support for the apartheid dictatorship of Israel against that theocratic-racist nation’s non-Jews, fits into a larger picture of the supremacist nation that America itself has increasingly become. Continue reading →
Trump does seem like a dangerous idiot suddenly and unexpectedly set loose on the world of international affairs, a world which normally assumes an appearance of restraint and order and careful words. Continue reading →
A recent article in the Washington Post described how the current US tax-‘reform’ bill is being shaped; and it describes, basically (at least as far as tax-law changes are concerned), the operation of a US dictatorship by the super-rich. Continue reading →
In a recent talk before Chatham House think-tank in London, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approached the issue of a Palestinian state from an intellectual perspective. Continue reading →
The postponing of an Israeli Knesset bill that would have annexed major illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank to the Jerusalem municipality is the result of behind-the-scenes US and, possibly, European pressure. But the story of the so-called ‘Greater Jerusalem law’ does not end there. Continue reading →
It’s an open secret that the “Soros network” has an extensive sphere of influence in the European Parliament and in other European Union institutions. The list of Soros has been made public recently. The document lists 226 MEPs from all sides of political spectrum, including former President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt, seven vice-presidents, and a number of committee heads, coordinators, and quaestors. These people promote the ideas of Soros, such as bringing in more migrants, same-sex marriages, integration of Ukraine into the EU, and countering Russia. There are 751 members of the European Parliament. It means that the Soros friends have more than one third of seats. Continue reading →
In the recent, and supposedly last, release of files pertaining to the Kennedy assassination, most of the corporate press did not dwell on the fact that the most important and secret files were kept from the public, but, of course, that was actually the big story. Continue reading →
As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment that had already killed millions of people. Continue reading →
It is easy to be distracted right now by the circus politics that have dominated the news headlines for the past year, but don’t be distracted. Continue reading →
If any other public agency had blown hundreds of billions of dollars, Congress would hold hearings. If it's the Pentagon, it gets $80 billion more.
Everyone hates government waste. President Trump believes it is “our moral duty to the taxpayer” to “make our government leaner and more accountable,” and his political opponents seem to agree. Continue reading →
During his visit to hurricane-stricken Puerto Rico, President Donald Trump shocked the bond market when he told Geraldo Rivera of Fox News that he was going to wipe out the island’s bond debt. Continue reading →
The Western media have been awash in speculation as to why, about a year ago, North Korea’s “crazy” leadership suddenly launched a crash program to vastly improve its ballistic missile capabilities. That question has now been answered. Continue reading →
This latest mass shooting in Las Vegas that left more than 50 people dead and more than 500 injured is as obscure as they come: a 64-year-old retiree with no apparent criminal history, no military training, and no obvious axe to grind opens fire on a country music concert crowd from a hotel room 32 floors up using a semi-automatic gun that may have been rigged to fire up to 700 rounds a minute, then kills himself. Continue reading →
Donald Trump’s bombastic rhetoric aimed at North Korea is evidence that neither he nor his administration grasp the historic paranoia of the North Korean government. The fear in Pyongyang that North Korea will become a ceded territory in a big power agreement has been a factor since the days of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung. This existential threat also formed the policies of Kim Il Sung’s successors—his son Kim Jong Il and his grandson, the present leader, Kim Jong Un. Continue reading →
Two of the U.S. government’s supposed allies are supposedly not allies of each other but enemies of each other, but, away from the glare of the ‘news’ media, they actually work together with each other to control, by means of their secret actual alliance with one-another, a substantial, if not the major, part of U.S. foreign policies—especially regarding Iran, Russia, Syria, Israel, Palestinians, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Turkey, but much else besides. These two secret allies of each other, who largely determine U.S. foreign policies, are the Saud family and the government of Israel. Continue reading →
The tumultuous events that dominate international news today cannot be accurately understood outside of their underlying context, which connects them together, into a broader narrative—the actual history of our time. History makes sense, even if news reports about these events don’t. Propagandistic motivations cause such essential facts to be reported little (if at all) in the news, so that the most important matters for the public to know, get left out of news accounts about those international events. Continue reading →
Now that finally the U.S. government has officially terminated its arming and training of the jihadist gangs that are fighting to overthrow and replace Syria’s government, the neoconservative mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media are disagreeing with each other over how to communicate this fact to the American people without contradicting, or otherwise violating, the false ‘history’ they’ve all been presenting and preserving, throughout the past five years, which has described the U.S. government as being opposed to the jihadists in Syria, instead of as the U.S. government’s arming and training jihadists to overthrow and replace Syria’s government. That’s a pretty blatant ‘historical’ lie, which they’ve all been maintaining, now, for five years; and, they’re at loggerheads over whether or how they’ll deal with it, now that the program (whose very existence they’ve helped the government to hide from the public) has been so publicly and suddenly ordered to end. Continue reading →
On Friday night, July 28, US President Donald Trump said that he would sign into law the increased economic sanctions (passed by 98–2 in the Senate and 419–3 in the House) against any business that is declared to have “knowingly provided goods or services . . . for construction, modernisation, or repair of Russia’s energy export pipelines.” Continue reading →
Urban billionaires are trotting out the tractors and overalls in a bizarre effort to roll back their taxes.
After this summer, President Trump and the Republican Congress have one big item on their agenda: taxes. Specifically, cutting them for the rich. Continue reading →
US President Donald J. Trump, in a step that could embolden Saudi Arabia to move ahead with plans to destabilize Iran, has instructed White House aides to give him the arguments for withholding certification in October that Iran has complied with its nuclear agreement with world powers. Continue reading →
If the documents that Donald Jr. was emailing about are deemed valuable, soliciting them is a criminal offense. A legal expert weighs in.
Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s private lawyers, has been making the rounds of radio, and network and cable TV shows trying to put out the fire set by Donald Trump Jr.’s release of emails which confirm that Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who claimed to have compromising material about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race. Continue reading →
A friend of mine from India tells a story about driving an old Volkswagen beetle from California to Virginia during his first year in the United States. In a freak ice storm in Texas he skidded off the road, leaving his car with a cracked windshield and badly dented doors and fenders. When he reached Virginia he took the car to a body shop for a repair estimate. The proprietor took one look at it and said, “it’s totaled.” My Indian friend was bewildered: “How can it be totaled? I just drove it from Texas!” Continue reading →
The most encouraging trend in the otherwise bleak landscape of Western politics is the success of the “new kind of politics” unveiled by Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., and parallel movements, parties and candidates in other countries. 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 →
On Monday, June 12, in his first public cabinet meeting, Trump is seen accepting a North-Korean-style pledge from his sycophant cabinet members, on live television, after he had praised himself profusely. This was eerie: Watching all these secretaries humiliating themselves in lavishly praising the self-appointed ‘Great One.’ They all echoed Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who said: “We thank you for the opportunity and blessing to serve your agenda.” This was quite a totalitarian show, rarely seen in a democracy, but common in a dictatorship. Continue reading →
Arising from a combination of Donald Trump’s tweets and statements about subjects from Qatar to Taiwan and NATO to Palestine, old border disputes and diplomatic rivalries are beginning to flare up. The Trump administration also appears to be unwilling to fill a number of vacancies in the State Department, a development that has added to a de facto American hands-off approach to many simmering international disputes. Continue reading →
