While the West’s corporate media were fixated on NATO adding tiny Montenegro to its membership roster, the Chinese- and Russian-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) added India and Pakistan as full members. The flags of India and Pakistan were raised at SCO headquarters in Beijing, following the June 8–9 SCO Summit in Astana, Kazakhstan. Continue reading
No doubt about it. Continue reading
Who designed the malware worm that is now wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of computers internationally by hackers demanding a king’s ransom? The U.S. government. Continue reading
On March 20, 2017, FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the bureau was investigating connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. Seven weeks later, Trump signed a bizarre letter firing him. Who wrote it? More precisely, where is White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II? Continue reading
Shakespeare’s famous line has drawn conflicting interpretations. To some, it’s a 16th century lawyer joke. But to others focused on the anarchist who spoke them, it’s a nod to the role of law in underpinning a civilized society. Upon admission to the bar, the lawyers surrounding Donald Trump swore fealty to the US Constitution. When they assumed their current duties on behalf of all Americans, they reaffirmed that oath. When Trump attacks the rule of law, his advisers with legal degrees have a special responsibility to speak up. Whatever they’re saying to Trump privately, their public defense of his indefensible assault on the judiciary is no joke, and they know it. Continue reading
Another terrible war crime against Syrian civilians has taken place in Syria, on top of multiple war crimes committed in that country torn apart by six years of a civil war marked by foreign interventions. On Tuesday, April 4, 2017, a chemical attack killed more than 70 people, including women and children. No neutral official investigation has yet taken place, but two versions of events have surfaced. Continue reading
The Republican House proposed healthcare legislation is a substantially more free-market approach to health care than exists in any industrialized nation. It would greatly reduce regulation of health care in America, and also considerably increase the choices that consumers would have in their health care. Another way of putting this is: it would considerably decrease the requirements that are placed upon health care insurers and providers. It would be as close to extreme free-market health care as can be achieved except for a system in which anyone can legally sell anything and call it “health insurance” or call it “medical care.” In other words, it would be more like anarchy in these fields. Continue reading
Like a scene out of a Hollywood epic movie, Saudi Arabian King Salman journeyed to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, with an entourage of 1000 aides and servants, including ten Cabinet ministers and 25 Saudi princes traveling aboard four Boeing 747s and two Boeing 777s. Indonesian president Joko Widodo termed the visit part of a “strategic partnership” between Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Salman also visited Malaysia, which has been embroiled in a major political scandal arising from the acceptance by its prime minister, Najib Razak, of a $1 billion “gift” from a stated-owned Saudi company. Political opponents of Razak have termed the gift a bribe. Continue reading
Syria’s peace-talks are about settling a horrific six-year-long war, but this is more of an international war that’s being waged on the battlefields of Syria, than it is a civil war within Syria itself. This fact is often ignored by the press, but the peace-talks are really more between the foreign powers than between their proxies who are killing each other (and Syria’s civilians) within Syria. These peace-talks are international because the principals in this war are international. And, because the principals are international, the principles that are being fought over are, too—they are so basic that the end-result from these talks will be not only some sort of new peace, but some sort of new Constitution for Syria: really a new nation of Syria. Continue reading
A century ago, a Southern academic and racist emerged in Europe and the United States as a crusader to “make the world safe for democracy.” [1] Wilson had been inaugurated as president in 1913, the year before Europe’s imperialists plunged the world into four years of mass murder. That war alone, caused some four million direct battle casualties and untold millions of non-combatant deaths in the aftermath. Woodrow Wilson, despite the policies he actually pursued, would be turned into an icon of the 20th century’s most enduring myth—the benevolence and humanitarian virtue of the great slaveholder republic founded in 1776. Wilson could arguably be called the nation’s first celebrity politician and international celebrity export. This remarkable marketing accomplishment predated television. Continue reading
Here is the reason why we are currently even closer to a civilization-ending nuclear war than was the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 . . . Continue reading
For those who might wonder why foreign policy makers repeatedly make bad choices, some insight might be drawn from the following analysis. The action here plays out in the United States, but the lessons are probably universal. Continue reading
“The United States has the power to decree the death of nations,” wrote Stephen Kinzer in the Boston Globe. Continue reading
“Do you think we would be better off under Hillary or Trump,” asked the members of my Writing Group, at the meeting first Sunday in October. Continue reading
Fifteen years ago, on October 19, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman AFB in Missouri, as they prepared to fly halfway across the world to wreak misdirected vengeance on the people of Afghanistan and begin the longest war in U.S. history. Rumsfeld told the bomber crews, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.” Continue reading
Presidents don’t give up power. Continue reading
I am one of those tiresome academics who has repeatedly criticized so-called privatization of government functions. I say “so-called” because what Americans call privatization is no such thing. Actual privatization would require government to sell off or otherwise abandon a particular activity, and let the private sector handle it, much like Margaret Thatcher selling England’s steel mills to private-sector interests. Continue reading
Growing volatility in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) does not augur well for the planet’s future. If current levels of entropy persist, the result would be a fossil-fuel induced global pandemonium. The mainstream and alternative media are of little help in making sense of the larger regional issues at stake, and one would have to resort to a risk foresight methodology—as the author did—to game out possible denouements. The following narrative represents one such end-scenario. Continue reading
Over the past weekend the Western press was blasting Russia and Syria for alleged war crimes in their assault on the terrorist controlled part of East Aleppo. A typical headline from The Washington Post read, “US accuses Russia of ‘barbarism’ and war crimes in Syria.” Meanwhile, the Long War Journal declared, “US hits another Islamic State chemical weapons facility in Iraq.” UK’s Foreign Minister Boris Johnson is crying foul that Russia should be investigated for war crimes. Continue reading
At a spring 2016 Republican debate attended by the Bushes, George H.W. “Poppy” Bush, looked directly at Donald Trump and gave him the “throat slit” gesture, the traditional threat of murder. The Bushes want the Clintons back in the White House. Continue reading
Events in Syria over this last week have thoroughly shattered the Russian-US ceasefire agreement reached in Vienna on September 9 between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Continue reading
Warring hotspots all over the world are flaring up in 2016 in what amounts to preparation for World War III between the military forces of the US-led Western Empire against the forces of the Eastern axis led by Russia and China, joined by Iran and North Korea. Let’s be clear—the globalists are the puppet masters behind the Western forces intentionally provoking catastrophic world war. Continue reading
Right out of the globalists’ population control playbook comes this year’s Zika virus. What the elite don’t want you to know is that the Zika virus has been around for 69 years. Until this year it was always known to be a relatively harmless virus with typical flu-like symptoms rarely if ever lethal. Yet in January 2016 all that changed overnight when the medical establishment and New World Order controllers unleashed Zika-mania hype as their latest fearmongering strategy designed to cause panic amongst the global population. Continue reading
Russia has once again been accused of being behind the hackers who have penetrated several, mostly unnamed, Washington-based think tanks. Continue reading
The risk of nuclear war has never been greater and it is partly because of NATO rearmament of European countries bordering on Russia. However, these countries will also be targeted if Putin decides to strike back. Thus write three Swedish doctors in an article in Göteborgsposten on Friday, August 12. Continue reading
New World Order propaganda rules and shapes the world. And there’s no more powerful propagator of propaganda that rules and shapes US global hegemony, world events and major geopolitical developments than the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). On its own website, the CFR describes itself as “an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher.” Continue reading
Sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the term “normalization of deviance” as she was investigating the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986. She used it to describe how the social culture at NASA fostered a disregard for rigorous, physics-based safety standards, effectively creating new, lower de facto standards that came to govern actual NASA operations and led to catastrophic and deadly failures. Continue reading
The purpose of this essay is to show that as capitalism has evolved from the early stages of small-scale manufacturing to the current stage of the dominance of finance capital, its arena of expropriation has, accordingly, expanded from the early colonial/imperial conquests abroad to today’s universal dispossession worldwide, both at home and abroad. Specifically, it aims to expose the class nature of imperialism independent of nationality and/or geography, and to indicate how this profit-driven characteristic of capitalism is at the root of today’s global austerity economics; an ominous development that dispossesses not only defenseless peoples abroad, but also the overwhelming majority of the people at home—a socio-economic plague that can be called the “new imperialism,” or “imperialism by dispossession”. Continue reading
Part I considered the remarkable similarities between Armenians and Jews. They both were socialist, then capitalist, adapting as the need arose. Both suffered genocides and achieved independence as fallouts from the upheavals of the 20th century. Continue reading
The world hovers on the edge of war, not only in Israel-Palestine, Syria, Ukraine, but in Eurasia’s ground zero, where Armenia and Azerbaijan are always on the cusp of a new outbreak of their unresolvable conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in the centre of the post-Soviet ‘republic’ of Azerbaijan. Continue reading
From its inception in 1951 as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), through its phase as the European Economic Community (EEC) formed in 1958, to the treaty known as the Single European [Market] Act of 1986, setting the birth of the European Union (EU) for 1992, the planners of the free-trade area in Europe knew that the consequences would be unemployment and migration—the result of curbing the power of unions, depressing wages, and removing the social safety net. If there is a culprit in the Brexit vote it’s the “free trade” orthodoxy of the EU and its assault on the welfare state and workers’ rights. Continue reading
With their government under the control of corporations and special interests, the People of the United States may think they have the right to vote, but, unfortunately, they do not. When the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written, the authors intentionally omitted this very significant detail. They failed to include the right to vote, and the error has never been corrected. Continue reading
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