Martin Jay
Strategic Culture Foundation

The USAID move by Trump is a polite signal to Zelensky. Your time is up

What is USAID and what has it become a minor obsession with Donald Trump and Elon Musk? From its title you would be fooled into thinking it was an aid agency and nothing more. In fact, when JFK created it in the 60s it probably was simply that – a tool of the U.S. government to get vital aid to the most troubled corners of the world. But in recent times, USAID has taken on a role more sinister. These days it does the work of an intelligence agency which interferes in the internal politics of countries whose leaders the U.S. wants to topple, organizing underground campaigns and more recently funding NGOs and fake news outfits on a grand scale.

USAID is of course political. Traditionally it seems to have been a tool more of the Democrats than the Republicans who have brought all of their absurd woke values to it so that now it funds sex change operations in poor countries along with LGBT programs. USAID is still an aid agency and it is true to say much of its work is about delivering vital aid to countries in Africa or those who have suffered under the hands of leaders which the U.S. would describe as ‘tyrants’ like Assad in Syria. But it is this duplicitous role of being an aid agency and using its presence and staff as a tool for more nefarious work such as spying or even openly funding hundreds of fake news outfits which is really the problem.

Martin Jay
Strategic Culture Foundation

It’s hard to predict that Le Pen will get the required 51% with another party, the conservatives, in a coalition.

An enormous amount of excitement is being created by the French parliamentary elections which had its first round firmly won outright by Marine Le Pen’s far-right party. This was nothing out of the ordinary and for once the polls were spot on in their predictions.

But the second round will be a completely different game as traditionally, French voters often use the first vote as a protest vote against the main parties. It’s hard to predict that Le Pen will get the required 51% with another party, the conservatives, in a coalition. Her victory though might be just what France needs as she has a number of radical policies which she believes will shake up the economy. But it’s not her domestic policies which the West should worry about. It’s her ideas about France’s role in the EU which should be a worry for Brussels as, if her party wins and holds a majority, it will be able to command a political dynamic which will eclipse Macron and cast a new dye for Paris’s relations with the European Union.

Although many in France believe that she might win an outright victory in the next round, analysts predict that she will be a contender in next Presidential elections in three years’ time. If either scenario gives her an edge in the decision-making in the Élysée, the European Union is in for a rough ride as her demands will lead to a crisis which will bring about two possibilities; one, that the EU is divided into two camps – a two-speed Europe – which would effectively scrap the present unanimity voting system which allows Hungary to veto the big issues; or secondly, it will lead to the demise of the EU as we know it, which, in a bid to survive, would streamline itself and give more power back to member states.

Martin Jay
Strategic Culture Foundation

Biden’s breathtaking stupidity in Ukraine is finally going to expose NATO for what it is: a paper tiger.

Are we all preparing for the inevitable? Trump returning to the White House? It would seem that certainly the Biden administration is doing just that given recent events. Moscow’s terror attack has taken center stage of world news in recent days yet not one western journalist seems able to call out the ISIS warning from the U.S. for what it was: sham.

And not only the warning was disingenuous but the sheer bad taste vitriol of Washington which was on a level only matched by the suspicious outright and swift rejection that Kyiv had no part in the attack.

Bad taste seems to be the hallmark of the Biden administration, with a failed foreign policy which trails in second place. If Americans didn’t know before that the U.S. could not control two proxy wars on two separate fronts, now they know. As the aid parcels which drop onto Palestinians – sometimes even killing them – makes a statement in itself, it’s interesting to see how Biden is always looking in the past in almost everything he does. Even Russia Gate has been dragged out of its dank grave and had new life breathed into it by Biden’s press people, who are now preparing the American public for a Biden failure in December. The biggest fear for Biden is the “hack and leak” attack, which pushed many democrats over a line with Hillary Clinton when her emails revealed what an utterly morose political figure she is. Who could forget that “there are terrorists there [in Syria] but they’re on our side” comment when talking about the early days of the Syrian crisis which started in 2011?

Martin Jay
Strategic Culture Foundation

NATO’s 75th birthday is coming around soon, with celebrations planned for July of next year in Washington. Yet the organisation has a bit of a problem with the party and celebrations.

When people reach the ripe old age of 75, there is usually a tendency to slow down and take things easier; often there’s a lack of cohesion, sentences often aren’t completed, delusion and incompetence become more noticeable if not plain idiocy on a scale not previously seen. In some cases, relatives might even talk of assisted suicide to put the old bugger out of his misery, with some even as going as far to talk about being “brain-dead”.

NATO’s 75th birthday is coming around soon, with celebrations planned for July of next year in Washington. Yet, the organisation has a bit of a problem with the party and celebrations. What’s there to celebrate with Ukraine more or less, a war that even die-hard Republicans in America admit is a war which cannot be won? 75 years old, NATO is looking more and more like an outdated institution which, if anything, is going to fall on its sword at some point when the world wakes up and realises what a con it is.

But the old git has to be kept alive at all costs, largely to keep up appearances for new members and also to protect the reputations of western leaders who have staked theirs on the war in Ukraine being a righteous win.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen is a lucky man. The former NATO chief is fortunate enough to actually not look as stupid as he really is and is at a period in his so-called career where he can say patently idiotic things, and it doesn’t matter. But his latest idea – to give Ukraine some kind of token, half-cocked NATO membership – is braindead nonsense on a whole new scale which we haven’t seen before.

Martin Jay
Strategic Culture Foundation

A Russian soldier guards the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power
plant in southern Ukraine, May 2022 ( © Getty)

The killing fields of Ukraine are the setting of an even greater war, one of propaganda, Martin Jay writes.

John Pilger was right. The killing fields of Ukraine are the setting of an even greater war, one of propaganda. It is quite extraordinary how so much of what we read in the UK press originates from a U.S.-funded propaganda bureau in Kiev so much so that it has become the norm for an event to be ‘reported’ based on what President Zelensky just merely says.

The contrast and hypocrisy are stunning. Consider the moronic ramblings of CNN reporters from all over the world asked to take us through the events of the so-called “attempted coup d’état.” They were based in the U.S., London and — of course — Ukraine, in the case of the dim-witted Ben Wedeman. All of them in chorus talking of Putin “on the edge” or staring “the abyss in the eye” but not one of them able to say “according to my sources” or “from people I’m speaking to in Russia”. No. That would be too close to a bygone era of reporting which left us long ago. All we have now is overweight buffoons like our Ben — who, despite being an Arabic speaker was so poor in Lebanon that he managed to falsely report the country’s debt as “mostly foreign” — who only “report” Russia though a Ukrainian prism which was probably written for him. This is how bad western media is. To be a journalist these days, you need two poignant skills. One, to have a great memory for the narrative that you have to replicate. And two, to have an almost morbid fear of nuance or detail. These CNN reporters were basically clueless and just made it up as they went along. They were, like most of us, nothing more than spectators, drowning in their own bigotry and blinded dogma.

Sandy English

The fatal shooting of two New York City police officers on Saturday has been followed by a series of extraordinary statements from the police union and its political allies. Charging that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has “blood on his hands,” the police are demanding a crackdown on protests and the criminalization of all opposition to police killings.

Officers Raphael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were sitting in their vehicle in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn when, shortly before 3 pm on Saturday, the apparent shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, approached the car and killed both.

Brinsley, 28, had driven from a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland to Brooklyn after shooting and wounding his former girlfriend. The young man, who was clearly mentally unbalanced and evidently suicidal, seems to have been motivated in part by the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City.

After he shot Ramos and Liu, Brinsley was pursued by police into a nearby subway station, where he killed himself.

The response of the police has bordered on mutiny. As Mayor de Blasio walked to a press conference on Saturday, dozens of police officers demonstratively turned their backs on him. Police have issued a series of denunciations of de Blasio for having indicated some sympathy for demonstrations against police violence held in the wake of a grand jury’s decision not to charge NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the chokehold death of Garner.

Pepe Escobar

A picture downloaded from the US air force website
shows F-16 Fighting Falcons from the 35th and 80th
Fighter Squadrons (AFP Photo/US Air Force)

Only a few days before the 12th anniversary of 9/11, Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama might be fighting side by side with… al-Qaeda, as he was foolish enough to be trapped by his own rhetoric on Syria.

The dogs of war bark and the caravan… is Tomahawked. Amid out-of-control hysteria, the proverbial “unnamed US officials” spin like demented centrifuges.

Obama’s “kinetic operation” on Syria will fall out of the sky “in the next few days.” It will be “limited,” lasting only “three days,” or “no more than two days.” It will “send a message,” a “short, sharp attack” against less than 50 sites on a list of targets.

But then long-range bombers may “possibly” join the Tomahawk barrage, and all bets are off.

A proverbial, anonymous “senior administration official” even stressed the “desire to get it done before the president leaves for Russia next week.”

That’s it; we bomb a country like dialing a pizza delivery, and then we go to a G20 summit with the world’s emerging powers hosted by no less than Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Just because we need to prove that the president of the United States meant what he said: chemical weapons are a red line. And to hell who’s responsible for deploying them.

I’m not making this up. This is the core of White House spokesman Jay Carney’s message, when he said, in faultless Newspeak: “The options that are being considered do not contain within them a regime change focus.”

So the administration of “constitutional lawyer” Barack Obama is mulling how to attack Syria, bypassing the UN Security Council – which will veto, via Russia and China, the new resolution proposed by the UK; bypassing always-docile NATO; and with 91 percent of Americans against it, just to send an (explosive) political message. And all because a US president was foolish enough to get trapped in his own rhetoric.

Stephen Lendman

Paul Simon's 1975 "Still Crazy After All These Years" album featured the hit song "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover." Subverting peace perhaps is simpler. Four decades of futile Israeli/Palestinian talks prove it. There never was a peace process. There's none now. It's a convenient fiction. It's an illusion. It's fake. It's a sham. It's a charade. Pretense pretends otherwise. It substitutes for reality.

Here's why. Israel deplores peace. So does Washington. They're warrior states. They're not peacemakers. They never were. They're not now. They proliferate violence and instability. Their entire histories reflect it. Peace is inherently abhorrent. It defeats their agenda. Imperial marauding requires conflict. Rule of law principles don't matter. They're systematically spurned. Racism is institutionalized. So are apartheid, colonization, barbaric persecution, and injustice.

Imagine holding talks with Palestine's legitimate government excluded. Imagine letting longtime Israeli collaborators represent them. Imagine longstanding Israeli intransigence. Imagine involving Washington. Imagine it acting as interlocutor. Imagine letting it orchestrate proceedings. Imagine the worst possible outcome. It's certain. It's guaranteed. It's decided. Talks are illegitimate. They're theater. They assure failure and betrayal.

Thomas Gaist

A Bahraini armoured personnel vehicle reinforces US
embassy security in Manama, Bahrain. (Associated Press)

Patrick Martin: The US terror scare

The US State Department announced Sunday that 19 foreign embassies will remain closed all week in accordance with the ongoing global terror alert announced Friday. The alert was launched, according to a White House statement, in response to a threat “possibly occurring in or emanating from the Arabian Peninsula.” Britain and a number of other European countries moved to close their facilities in Yemen as well.

US officials said on Sunday that the decision to extend the closures was based on the need to “exercise caution” and not on new information regarding possible attacks. On Monday afternoon, the State Department released information citing “a rare intercepted communication” between Ayman al-Zawahri in Pakistan and Nasir al-Wahisi in Yemen, claiming that this intercept prompted the terror alert.

The media continues to promote the claims of the government uncritically, despite the absence of any factual substantiation and the vague and non-specific nature of the purported threat. There is barely a hint from the corporate-controlled media that previous terror alerts in the course of the so-called “war on terror” have proven baseless, and no reference to the rampant lying of the government in relation to the illegal spying operations that have been exposed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

Lawmakers, both Democratic and Republican, continue to seize on the terror alert as supposed justification for the National Security Agency’s sweeping eavesdropping and data collection programs, which are in flagrant violation of the US Constitution. Yet there is no suggestion in the alarmist media reports that there might be an ulterior political motive behind the sudden announcement of an imminent terror threat.

William Blum

It’s not easy being a flag-waving American nationalist. In addition to having to deal with the usual disillusion, anger, and scorn from around the world incited by Washington’s endless bombings and endless wars, the nationalist is assaulted by whistle blowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, who have disclosed a steady stream of human-rights and civil-liberties scandals, atrocities, embarrassing lies, and embarrassing truths. Believers in “American exceptionalism” and “noble intentions” have been hard pressed to keep the rhetorical flag waving by the dawn’s early light and the twilight’s last gleaming.

That may explain the Washington Post story (July 20) headlined “U.S. asylum-seekers unhappy in Russia”, about Edward Snowden and his plan to perhaps seek asylum in Moscow. The article recounted the allegedly miserable times experienced in the Soviet Union by American expatriates and defectors like Lee Harvey Oswald, the two NSA employees of 1960 – William Martin and Bernon Mitchell – and several others. The Post’s propaganda equation apparently is: Dissatisfaction with life in Russia by an American equals a point in favor of the United States: “misplaced hopes of a glorious life in the worker’s paradise” … Oswald “was given work in an electronics factory in dreary Minsk, where the bright future eluded him” … reads the Post’s Cold War-clichéd rendition. Not much for anyone to get terribly excited about, but a defensive American nationalist is hard pressed these days to find much better.