The Howard P. “Buck” McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2015 (Defense Authorization Act) should be renamed the Howard P. “Buck” McKeon Global Manifest Destiny Act of FY2015. The Defense Authorization Act reads like something that the Biffer-Baum Birds in Dr. Seuss’ Sleep Book might have written. And the image that most accurately depicts the collective efforts of President Obama, the Pentagon and the US Congress in the design of American national security strategy is Dr. Seuss’ illustration of the Biffer-Baum Birds constructing their nest out of bricks and threads: a precarious construction indeed. Continue reading →
Western propaganda about events in Ukraine has two main purposes. One is to cover up, or to distract from, Washington’s role in overthrowing the elected democratic government of Ukraine. The other is to demonize Russia. Continue reading →
A somewhat incendiary reply to a ludicrous question
This question is asked repeatedly in the English-language media—probably the most heavily censored data streams in the world (a point to which I will return). Why should anyone worry about a new “cold war”? Perhaps it would be more relevant to worry about the extent of current and future “hot” ones? Continue reading →
One day while Alice is winding up a ball of wool that Kitty persists in undoing, she gets it into her head that there must be a world behind the looking glass (mirror) where everything is backward. Suddenly, she finds herself up on the mantelpiece staring into the looking glass. Then she walks through to the reality on the other side to find a world that is set up like a chessboard and chess pieces are animated human-like creatures. The reflected reality is the opposite of real reality. Time goes backwards. Continue reading →
In the faceoff with the United States and its allies over the Ukraine crisis, President Vladimir Putin of Russia seems to have blinked. On May 7, he asked the pro-Russian protesters who were calling for the May 11 referendum on “federalization” to postpone the autonomy vote. At the same time he also endorsed the junta’s hastily scheduled May 25 presidential election, which is designed to give legitimacy to the illegitimate regime in Kiev. Mr. Putin further announced that Russian troops along the Ukraine-Russian border had returned to their usual (pre-crisis) positions. Continue reading →
Next week, Congress will begin debate on a roughly $601 billion Pentagon budget for FY2015. Before we let this pass unchallenged, let’s take a few minutes to put it in some historical perspective. Continue reading →
At this time of economic turmoil it can be difficult to perceive for oneself how the principle of sharing is a solution to world problems, and this is especially true for many intellectuals. There are libraries of books and reports that analyse what is wrong with society, the majority of which are trying to reach the impossible—which is to propose new ideas and alternative policies to the government. A government that represents and upholds the disastrous commercialisation of our political, economic and social structures. Continue reading →
And 31 where he's less popular than George W. Bush—including Kenya
During the Bush years, people all over the world were horrified by America’s aggression, human rights abuses and militarism. By 2008, only one in three people around the world approved of the job performance of U.S. leaders. The election of President Obama broadcast his message of hope and change far beyond U.S. shores, and Gallup’s 2009 U.S.-Global Leadership Project (USGLP) recorded a sharp rise in global public approval of U.S. leadership to 49 percent. Continue reading →
(WMR)—The White House media spinmeisters and the talking heads of Bloomberg News and CNBC dare not say it but the sanctions on Russia, being crafted by Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew’s team at the Department of Treasury, are beginning to take their toll on the economies of the United States and western Europe. Continue reading →
News that General Wesley Clark, USA (Ret.) visited the Ukraine at the behest of the National Security Advisor there—and also a senior member of Ukraine’s parliament—should be a cause for alarm. A nonprofit foundation was involved in this exercise (more below). There is a sense of open, almost joyful viciousness in all this pro-war, anti-Russian sentiments on opinion pages and television broadcasts. It is certainly racist and demeaning in tone. Such is the first step in convincing the public that the “transgressor” is equivalent to a retrovirus. Continue reading →
The darkness to which I refer is something largely unanticipated in political studies and even in science fiction, a field which definitely enters this discussion, as readers will see. Continue reading →
‘Sharing is the key to solving the world’s problems.’ Such a statement is so simple that it may fail to make an appeal, so we must go much deeper into this subject if we want to comprehend what this means. In order to understand how sharing is the surest guide to justice, peace and right human relations, we need to investigate its meaning and significance from many angles—including psychologically and spiritually, as well as from a social, economic and political perspective. Continue reading →
Soon after the 2004 U.S. coup to depose President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, I heard Aristide’s lawyer Ira Kurzban speaking in Miami. He began his talk with a riddle: “Why has there never been a coup in Washington D.C.?” The answer: “Because there is no U.S. Embassy in Washington D.C.” This introduction was greeted with wild applause by a mostly Haitian-American audience who understood it only too well. Continue reading →
US Secretary of State John Kerry couldn’t hide his frustration anymore as the US-sponsored peace process continued to falter. After 8 months of wrangling to push talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority forward, he admitted while in a visit to Morocco on April 4 that the latest setback had served as a ‘reality check’ for the peace process. But confining that reality check to the peace process is hardly representative of the painful reality through which the United States has been forced to subsist in during the last few years. Continue reading →
NATO was established in April 1949. It’s a US imperial tool. It’s been this way from inception. Washington provides the lion’s share of funding. It’s around 75%. Continue reading →
It was a different world two decades ago. The Soviet Union under Yeltsin’s hand capitulated to the West and the slow march away from a democratizing state began. The West had ‘won’ the Cold War and had it within its range to make a global ‘peace dividend’ with promises to not extend NATO into eastern Europe. The U.S. economy, although already on the path to serious economic debt problems, had worked side by side with China for a new era of global prosperity, at the same time that the economic tide in Russia was all about asset stripping and the rise of the oligarchs. Continue reading →
(WMR)—The neocons are as an influencing factor in America’s foreign policy today as they were during the darkest days of the Bush administration. The coup d’état by globalist bankers allied with neo-Nazis and Zionist cadres in Ukraine is linked through several neocon operations in Washington, DC, to the aggressive push by the United States to topple progressive governments and politicians in Latin America. Continue reading →
Writing in The Washington Post on February 27, 2011, Rachel Bronson asked: “Could the next Mideast uprising happen in Saudi Arabia?” Her answer was: “The notion of a revolution in the Saudi kingdom seems unthinkable.” Continue reading →
On July 3, 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed a directive authorizing the secret funding and support for the Afghan Mujahedeen, the purpose of which was to escalate an internal war against the government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The directive, whose principal author was President Carter’s national security puppeteer Zbigniew Brzezinski, came to be known as Operation Cyclone, and its implementation resulted in Soviet intervention into Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979. Continue reading →
Many countries around the world are plagued by all kinds of armed rebellions, economic sanctions, civil wars, “democratic” coup d’états and/or wars of “regime change.” These include Ukraine, Venezuela, Syria, Thailand, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia and Lebanon. Even in the core capitalist countries the overwhelming majority of citizens are subjected to brutal wars of economic austerity. Continue reading →
For centuries, the United States Constitution has been held up to the world as one of civilization’s greatest achievements. It has been exalted and extolled at home and abroad, emulated and imitated by countries in both hemispheres. In some broad sense, it has provided a foundation for our belief in man’s perfectibility and the possibility of government that serves the common good. Continue reading →
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. Continue reading →
The recent two-day first official visit in forty years by an Egyptian defense minister to Russia of Egypt’s strongman, Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, accompanied by Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy, was indeed an historic breakthrough in bilateral relations, but it is still premature to deal with or build on it as a strategic shift away from the country’s more than three-decade strategic alliance with the United States. Continue reading →
The Central Intelligence Agency appears to be caught in a time warp. At the roots of the CIA’s and George Soros’s “resistance” movement in Ukraine lie Ukrainian fascists and pro-Nazis, the ideological forbears of the current Ukrainian right-wing fascist party Svoboda and other radical right and anti-Russian groups largely based in western Ukraine. Continue reading →
On Friday, Feb. 14, 92 prisoners escaped from their prison in the Libyan town of Zliten. Nineteen of them were eventually recaptured, two of whom were wounded in clashes with the guards. It was just another daily episode highlighting the utter chaos which has engulfed Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Ghaddafi in 2011. Continue reading →
Make no mistake about it, Ukraine’s troubles, engineered from outside of the country by the usual troika of the European Union “securocrats” who are beholden to the interests of the United States and NATO, George Soros-funded and U.S. non-governmental organization-trained street and social media provocateurs, and the Central Intelligence Agency and its diplomat-spies, is a template for what the West has planned for Russia. Continue reading →
A few days ago, I explained how economists and policymakers destroyed our economy for the sake of short-term corporate profits from jobs offshoring and financial deregulation. Continue reading →
Obsessed with the “Iran threat,” which leads to its warmongering in Syria, Saudi Arabia is acting like a bull in a china shop, wreaking regional havoc in an already Arab fragile political environment and creating what George Joffe’ of Cambridge University’s Centre of International Studies, on December 30, called the “second Arab cold war,” the first being the Saudi-led cold war with the Pan-Arab Egypt of Gamal Abdul Nasser, since the 1960s. Continue reading →
Bill Keller, editorialist for The NY Times and former executive editor of the paper, has recently penned a strong attack on Vladimir Putin, arguing that Putin’s leadership “deliberately distances Russia from the socially and culturally liberal West,” describing the Kremlin’s policies as “laws giving official sanction to the terrorizing of gays and lesbians, the jailing of members of a punk protest group for offenses against the Russian Orthodox Church, the demonizing of Western-backed pro-democracy organizations as ‘foreign agents,’ expansive new laws on treason, limits on foreign adoptions.” Continue reading →
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was scheduled to start his ninth trip of shuttle diplomacy between Palestinian and Israeli leaders on this December 11. However, the bridging “security arrangements,” which he proposed less than a week earlier on his last trip, have backfired and are now snowballing into a major crisis with Palestinian negotiators who view Kerry’s “ideas” as a coup turning the US top diplomat from a mediator into an antagonist. Continue reading →
In his refusal to sign the Afghan-US security pact which would enable some US troops to stay in Afghanistan after 2014, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is signaling a clear message to the United States: Afghanistan does not need US troops on its ground any more. Continue reading →
Vigilantes with a badge: The war against the American people
Posted on February 28, 2014 by John W. Whitehead
The following incidents are cautionary tales for anyone who still thinks that they can defy police officers, even if it’s simply to disagree about a speeding ticket, challenge a search warrant or defend oneself against an unreasonable or unjust charge, without deadly repercussions. The message they send is that “we the people” have very little protection from the standing army that is law enforcement. Continue reading →