President Biden’s beacon has been deflected to the rugged trails of aggression, Brian Cloughley writes. The Washington Post put it gleefully by headlining that as a result of the January 26 Biden-Putin telephone call “The Biden-Putin relationship is already on the rocks.” It was no surprise that the profoundly anti-Russia Post would take an entirely…
“In his [1996] arms-to-Iraq enquiry, Lord Richard Scott heard evidence that an entire tier of the Thatcher government, from senior civil servants to ministers, had lied and broken the law in selling weapons to Saddam Hussein…Thumb through old copies of the Baghdad Observer, and there are pictures of… cabinet ministers, on the front page sitting…
For decades, the National Defense Authorization Act has been the lifeblood of the US imperium, guaranteeing a flow of money across the military. A better term for such a bill would use the word offence in it, but lawmakers and industry lobbyists find that granting reserves of cash is better justified when one is constantly…
The mass media are reporting that the Biden camp has selected former general Lloyd J. Austin III to be the next secretary of defense, assuaging fears among antiwar activists that the position would go to bloodthirsty psychopath Michele Flournoy as commonly predicted. As has become the standard ritual for Biden’s cabinet picks, the mass media are holding…
Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. In…
Here is a word that risks deterring you from reading on much further, even though it may hold the key to understanding why we are in such a terrible political, economic and social mess. That word is “externalities”. It sounds like a piece of economic jargon. It is a piece of economic jargon. But it is also…
