Dangerous Times

We are living in a dangerous world. The world by itself is not dangerous. It becomes dangerous by some people living in it. Those who can push a button that annihilates existence as we know it, and those who have the power to destroy the environment for profit, are the same, a few, and in power.

When the United States government gained access to nuclear power, tested it in Hiroshima and Nagasake and as a result, killed and injured near half of the population of those cities. Of course, the casualties of nuclear bombs continue through the generations to this day. On the other hand, environmental depredation of the current years are wake up calls to those who seek profits for a few corporations, over humanity at large.

As Faith Flags in U.S. Government, Many Voters Want to Upend the System

Reid J. Epstein

July 13, 2022

Desire for structural changes cuts across both parties, a Times/Siena College poll found, but for starkly different reasons. Even Democrats now question if the government is a force for good.

Biden, Lapid Sign Joint US-Israel Declaration Against Iran

Dave DeCamp

July 14, 2022

The declaration says the US will use all of its 'national power' to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Thursday signed a joint declaration in Jerusalem on Thursday that included strong language against Iran.

The document, officially called the Jerusalem US-Israel Strategic Partnership Joint Declaration, says the US would use all of its “national power” to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

Imperial Detritus

Andrew J. Bacewich

July 12, 2022

“The American Century Is Over.” So claims the July 2022 cover of Harper’s Magazine, adding an all-too-pertinent question: “What’s Next?”

What, indeed? Eighty years after the United States embarked upon the Great Crusade of World War II, a generation after it laid claim to the status of sole superpower following the fall of the Berlin Wall and two decades after the Global War on Terror was to remove any lingering doubts about who calls the shots on Planet Earth, the question could hardly be more timely.

“Empire Burlesque,” Daniel Bessner’s Harper’s cover story, provides a useful, if preliminary, answer to a question most members of our political class, preoccupied with other matters, would prefer to ignore. Yet the title of the essay contains a touch of genius, capturing as it does in a single concise phrase the essence of the American Century in its waning days.

Ukraine Could Tear Europe Apart

Doug Bandow

July 7, 2022

Last week the U.S. and Europe loudly proclaimed their everlasting support for Ukraine at both the G7 meeting and NATO summit. So far money and arms continue to flow to Kiev.

However, just as Ukraine’s backers were pleasantly surprised at that nation’s stout defense against Russian aggression, they are increasingly discomfited by the failure of sanctions to wreck Moscow’s economy. The push to end Russian energy exports has proved especially counterproductive, slowing European economies while raising both global energy prices and Moscow’s export earnings.

Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster

Jeffrey Sachs

June 27, 2022

The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.  The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons.  As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.

Whitewashing the Murder of Shireen Abu Akleh

Daniel Larison

July 8, 2022

Ensuring that client governments can do whatever they want with impunity matters more to Washington than the lives of American citizens and residents.

Gideon Levy condemns the State Department’s whitewashing of the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh:

"It’s difficult to imagine a more clumsy, unprofessional, ridiculous and even insulting mobilization in the service of Israeli propaganda. Once again it has been proven that America is willing to do anything, absolutely anything, to protect its precious darling; to conceal all its crimes, to make itself an object of ridicule, to disregard moral, legal and professional standards – all to cover up for Israel. America is telling Israel: Keep on killing journalists, as far as we’re concerned it’s fine. We will always say you didn’t mean to, that tragic circumstances killed Abu Akleh and not soldiers in the Duvdevan counterterrorism unit."

Candidate to Lead Israeli Military Wants to Ramp Up Assassinations of IRGC Leaders

Dave DeCamp

July 6, 2022

One of the leading candidates to take over as the chief of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has called for Israel to step up assassinations of leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

IDF Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir made the case in a 74-page paper for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel American think tank based in Washington. He said the assassinations were necessary to stop Iran from further entrenching itself in Syria.

The Constitution and forever prisoners

By: Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

July 4, 2022

When Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend, neighbor and colleague, James Madison, his view that the basis of government must be to preserve liberty rather than order, the War of Revolution against Great Britain had been won, the Articles of Confederation were in place and Madison was beginning to prepare for his pivotal role in the drafting of the Constitution.

Ukraine is the latest neocon disaster

 Jeffrey Sachs

June 27, 2022

The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.

Washington’s Sanctions War Kneecaps the West, Not Russia

 David Stockman

June 28, 2022

Washington’s cowardly proxy war against Russia reached a new level of absurdity over the weekend.

To wit, the G-7 knuckleheads declared an embargo on imports of Russia-sourced gold and forced Russia into technical default on its foreign debts by forbidding US companies from collecting the payments which Russian debtors had deposited in their accounts at non-sanctioned Russia banks.

In a word, ordinary commerce has become so weaponized by Washington that the world’s oldest money can no longer be freely exchanged on international markets. At the same time, interest payments made in good faith by Russian borrowers have been effectively seized and frozen in place by the US government.

 

And yet, where are the free enterprise Republicans?

The Media Celebrated Julian Assange and is Now Too Afraid to Defend Him

 By: Patrick Cockburn

June 27, 2022

It has become easier over the last month for governments to kill or imprison journalists whom they want to silence. But the most sinister aspect of this assault on freedom of speech is that it is facing such limited resistance from the very media that is under attack.

US intelligence agencies concluded in a report declassified by President Joe Biden that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Biden began by treating him as a pariah, but is now reversing this policy in the run-up to his visit to Saudi Arabia next month which is aimed at persuading MBS to pump more crude to replace Russian exports and bring down the oil price.

In other words, the murderers of Khashoggi have got what they wanted and shown with grisly brutality that no Saudi dissident journalist is safe, a precedent that will be taken to heart in Turkey, where MBS has been visiting this week. All is now forgiven by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly allied to Saudi Arabia, while the trial in absentia of the 26 alleged murderers of Khashoggi had already been transferred from Ankara to Riyadh.

 

US Held Secret Meeting With Israel, Arab Military Chiefs on Iran

Jason Ditz

6/26/2022

At the Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, the US held secret meetings in March with top military figures from Israel and the various Arab states in the Middle East. The focus, as ever, was on Iran.

Explain It to Me, Please

Explain It to Me, Please: If you want a war with Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela tell me why and how it would benefit Americans

 Phillip Giraldi

June 22, 2022

 

استقرار یک رهبریِ مردمی در ایران

چهل و اندی سال پیش، ایرانیان به پا خواستند تا خود را از یک دیکتاتوری وابسته و اجنبی پرست رها کنند. تاریخ ایران گواه بسیاری از این جنبش‌ها است، که همیشه در منطقه پرچم‌دار بوده است. آنچه که همواره ایرانیان را متحد کرده است تا جنبش‌های عظیمی بر ضد حاکمان ادمکش داشته باشند یک عزم ملی بوده است. رژیم فعلی نیز با همه دندان تیز نشان دادن‌ها و سفاکی، کاملا شکننده است.

امردم ایران هیچگاه طرفدار رژیم آخوندی نبودند، و شقاوت شوک آور این رژیم تنها نیروئی است که توانسته است آنرا بیش از چهار دهه در ایران پایدار نگاه دارد. جالب اینجاست که رژیم در برقراری وابستگی مجدد به غرب، آنچنان که در زمان شاه مرسوم بود، تلاش می‌کند، که البته چون در طول بقایش شعار آن مرگ بر آمریکا بوده است، جرات عنوان آنرا با صراحت ندارد. ولی سخنان عمال رژیم، در جبهه‌های راست و چپ، کاملا و به وضوح نمایان‌گر آن هستند.

Next 100 Days of Ukraine War

M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

JUNE 13, 2022

The New York-based Council on Foreign Relations held a videoconference on May 31 titled Russia’s War in Ukraine: How does it end? The president of the think tank Richard Haas chaired the panel of distinguished participants — Stephen Hadley, Prof. Charles Kupchan, Alina Polyakova and Lt. Gen. (Retd) Stephen Twitty. It was a great discussion dominated by the liberal internationalist stream that has so far guided President Biden’s national security team, which wants to help Ukraine fight a long war against Russia. 

Why It’s Hard To Take America’s Word on the Summit of the Americas

Ted Snider

June 16, 2022

President Biden has made the battle between autocracy and democracy a theme of his presidency. He invoked that theme again last week to explain to Latin America and the world why Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua were cut from the list of nations invited to the US hosted Summit of the Americas. The State Department explained that "It’s the president’s decision, but I think the president has been very clear about the presence of countries that by their actions do not respect democracy – they will not receive invitations."

But by Biden’s actions, it is difficult to take the US at its word that the Summit snubs were about democracy.

Why Russian intellectuals are hardening support for war in Ukraine

Anatol Lieven

June 6, 2022

Dr. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center until the Russian government closed it in April, was for many years one of the most important pragmatic Russian voices in support of cooperation with the West and the “westernization” of Russia. He was one of the few Russian figures still to retain some of Gorbachev’s hopes for a “common European home.” (I should say that I have known Dr Trenin since I was a British journalist in Moscow in the 1990s, and I was his colleague at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace between 2000 and 2004).

 

Biden Refuses to Mention the Worsening Dangers of Nuclear War. Media and Congress Enable His Silence.

Norman Solomon

June 10, 2022

I’ve just finished going through the more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiqués about the war in Ukraine that the White House has released and posted on its website since Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in early March. They all share with that speech one stunning characteristic – the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers. Yet we’re now living in a time when those dangers are the worst they’ve been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

 

America’s Gun Fetish

 June 7, 2022 By Chris Hedges

There will be no gun control, not only because of the gun lobby and a corrupt political class, but because for many white Americans the idea of the gun is the only power they have left.

Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. My grandfather, who had been a master sergeant in the army, had a small arsenal in his house in Mechanic Falls, Maine. He gave me a 2020 bolt action Springfield rifle when I was 7.

By the time I was 10, I had graduated to a Winchester lever action 30-30. I moved my way up the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Marksmanship Qualification Program, helped along by a summer camp where riflery was mandatory. Like many boys in rural America, I was fascinated by guns, although I disliked hunting.