We find ourselves at a moment where the financial and political systems that have dominated for decades are failing in a spectacular and irredeemable fashion. Those who pull the levers are (as usual) attempting to take advantage of the situation by rapaciously snatching and consolidating more wealth and power, while leaving the general public to … Read more
Since a few things became clear to me last year, I’ve consistently forecasted a significant worsening in U.S.-China relations and remained adamant that all the happy talk of trade deals and breakthroughs is just a lot of hot air. What first appeared to be a unique quirk of Donald Trump has morphed into bipartisan consensus … Read more
Two days before Bolivian president Evo Morales was pushed out by the country’s military, Mark Weisbot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research penned a warning about what was happening, and what might unfold, in a Nation article titled, The Trump Administration Is Undercutting Democracy in Bolivia. He noted: Multilateral organizations like the Organization … Read more
“Major movers” such as China, Russia and the European Union have a strong “motivation to de-dollarize,” said Korin, co-director at the energy and security think tank, on Wednesday. “We don’t know what’s going to come next, but what we do know is that the current situation is unsustainable.” – Anne Korin, Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Irrespective … Read more
As President Trump has said many times, we rebuilt China over the past 25 years. No truer words were spoken, but those days are over. The United States now recognizes China as a strategic and economic rival. – Vice President Mike Pence during a speech last week at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars … Read more
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. – Arundhati Roy Last week, Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard (and Jill Stein) Russian assets on a podcast. More specifically: “I’m not making any predictions, but … Read more
U.S. Attorney General William Barr, along with co-conspirators in the UK and Australia, recently wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg requesting he not move forward with a plan to implement end-to-end encryption across Facebook’s messaging services. A draft of the letter was published earlier this month by Buzzfeed, and it’s worth examining in some detail. … Read more
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. – Maya Angelou If nothing else, one silver lining to Donald Trump’s election is the exposure of establishment types, whether Democratic or Republican, for what they really are. We now recognize that there’s very little daylight between a neocon and a neoliberal, and … Read more
A second former Amazon employee would spark more controversy. Deap Ubhi, a former AWS employee who worked for Lynch, was tasked with gathering marketing information to make the case for a single cloud inside the DOD. Around the same time that he started working on JEDI, Ubhi began talking with AWS about rejoining the company. … Read more
All wars require casus belli, ostensible justifications. After all, despite humanity’s long history of vicious warfare, interstate combat often requires a government distant from its working class to motivate its people to kill and die for distant institutions and esoteric ideologies. That said, Washington doesn’t exactly have a strong track record of honesty regarding its … Read more