Category: News

"Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin" is the splendid title of John Mearsheimer’s article in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs. Like Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, the title alone, along with the prestige of the author in the firmament of the elite, make the book a potent weapon in the struggle to curb the U.S. Empire – before it permanently curbs us. Mearsheimer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and co-author with Stephen Walt, Professor and former Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, of the widely cited The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. If you wish to convince someone of the foul role played by NATO in Ukraine, this article is a superb primer.

The first two paragraphs give an apt summary of the article’s core thesis; they read in part:

"According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe…

"But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president – which he rightly labeled a "coup" – was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West."

Continue reading “Mearsheimer Pins Blame for Ukraine Crisis on US, But…”

This is a speech given at the Direct Democracy Festival at Thessaloniki on September 4, 2014 about the trend of decentralization creating a global commons on the Internet and the disruptive potential of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Thank you for inviting me to this event. I feel honored to be here in Greece, the birthplace of democracy.

I was born and grew up in Japan. I moved to the States as a young adult. I live beyond borders and don’t belong to one particular nation. In a sense, I find the Internet to be my home. Indeed if there wasn’t the Internet, I wouldn’t be here right now.

Often I find this online borderless world more real than the world outside. In this place called "real life", we are separated and controlled by the interlocking power of nation-states and corporations. Every aspect of our lives is financialized and imaginations are captured by institutionalized hierarchies. Yet in the interconnected world of cyberspace, I find that imagination is not just surviving but thriving.

I here ask a question. Can the imagination of this virtual world help free the world that has been commodified? Tonight I am going to talk about the resistance against enclosures happening on the Internet and how the trend of decentralization in recent years is facilitating a reopening of the commons.

BitTorrent, Pirate Bay, Creative Commons, Linux and WikiPedia. Here we see the emergence of waves of uprising that challenge this culture of ownership and are weaving a new network based on sharing.

Continue reading “Resistance Against Enclosure; Internet as Global Commons”

ISIS is facing growing criticism for its use of cluster monitions in its ongoing war in Iraq and Syria. The complaints, interestingly enough, began with allegations that Syria’s government was the one using the “banned” munitions, and was treated in a similar negative light.

Both ISIS and the Assad government are “bad guys” and so predictably their use of the munitions was going to be treated as beyond the pale. Yet the problem of cluster munition use is much older and wider-spread than just Syria/ISIS, and rarely gets treated as an important situation, or even a problem.

The US military heavily used cluster bombs during both the Iraq and Afghan wars, causing massive civilian casualties. The Israeli military littered southern Lebanon with munitions during their most recent war there, with unexploded ordinance continuing to kill Lebanese civilians to this day.

The US has similarly ignored the “ban” on cluster munitions use with a massive export of such bombs to Saudi Arabia only last year.

Cluster munitions have proven a huge humanitarian problem, killing civilians years after the war they were used in is over. Yet the ISIS use of such weapons is hardly out of keeping with international norms, and the problem of cluster bombs spans the globe. It is a mistake to treat ISIS as unusually bad for using such weapons when the US does so casually and with impunity, and has a stockpile of such weapons that far, far exceeds anything ISIS could ever dream of looting from what warehouses it has.

MEMORANDUM FOR: Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Ukraine and NATO

We the undersigned are longtime veterans of U.S. intelligence. We take the unusual step of writing this open letter to you to ensure that you have an opportunity to be briefed on our views prior to the NATO summit on September 4-5.

You need to know, for example, that accusations of a major Russian "invasion" of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence. Rather, the "intelligence" seems to be of the same dubious, politically "fixed" kind used 12 years ago to "justify" the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. We saw no credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq then; we see no credible evidence of a Russian invasion now. Twelve years ago, former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, mindful of the flimsiness of the evidence on Iraqi WMD, refused to join in the attack on Iraq. In our view, you should be appropriately suspicions of charges made by the US State Department and NATO officials alleging a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

President Barack Obama tried yesterday to cool the rhetoric of his own senior diplomats and the corporate media, when he publicly described recent activity in the Ukraine, as "a continuation of what’s been taking place for months now … it’s not really a shift."

Continue reading “Germany’s Merkel Needs To Ask Tough Questions at NATO Summit”

The maintenance of superpower prestige above all obligates the Obama Administration to launch a full scale air war against the against the well organized, well supplied and so far victorious barbaric Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria (formerly ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria).

After 13 years of stalemated wars against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Washington is in no position to ignore the much more powerful IS that now controls a third of the territory in two countries – larger than Great Britain and inhabited by 6 million people. This most powerful jihadist organization is the unanticipated byproduct of America’s ill-conceived imperial misadventures in the Islamic world.

Step by Step since IS’s startling early June takeover of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, President Obama has been incrementally increasing US involvement while awaiting sufficient political backing at home and broad international support to launch a war on the IS.

Continue reading “Iraq and Syria – The US Goes in Deeper”

Just weeks ago President Obama requested an extra $500 million dollars for Syrian rebels. Now with the ISIS rebels having spread across northern Iraq, European sources tell us that the U.S. is passing intelligence on to the Syrian army to target rebels in Syria.

The elective Bush war in Iraq for WMDs that never were is a good case history in the folly of U.S. interventionism. But the rise of ISIS is an even more compact representation of interventionism’s contradictions and failures.

This week Dr. Paul and Charles Goyette talk about ISIS, Syria, and U.S. foreign policy follies.

Listen Here

Charles Goyette is New York Times Bestselling Author of The Dollar Meltdown and Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America’s Free Economy. Check out Goyette and Paul’s national radio commentary: Ron Paul’s America and the Ron Paul and Charles Goyette Weekly Podcast. Goyette also edits The Freedom and Prosperity Letter.