MATT TAIBBI—There’s a longer story to be written about the sudden collapse of many of the core premises of the last eight years of American politics, in particular the notion that Trump is such a unique “existential” threat that the system would not bear treating him like any other politician. In conjunction with Trump’s documents case collapsing and a list of other retreats on the lawfare/prosecution front, we appear headed for a new world, though what that will look like remains very unclear.
ANTI-NEOLIBERALISM
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BRIAN BERLETIC—The US through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has created large numbers of media platforms, political organizations, and education programs meant to convince the Philippine people that serving US foreign policy objectives is in their own best interests. The ultimate irony is that these US efforts have convinced Filipinos that fighting China is necessary to protect their sovereignty, when in fact US influence over Philippine foreign policy already constitutes the usurpation of Philippine sovereignty.
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PAUL EDWARDS—What he can and must be blamed for is his long, disgraceful, and devious career as a phony, smarmy, glad-handing flack for Big Money as the Senator from MBNA, his vulgarly cynical two-faced record on race relations, his Chickenhawk cheerleading for every military crime and folly, his rah-rahing for our fubar debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and finally, now, in his dotage, funding and embracing mass murder by Nazi Israel in Gaza and a grossly evil proxy war in Ukraine that bids fair to trigger World War III.
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ALEKS—Much of what we will discuss in this article will deal with the number of Russian casualties, as alluded to in the introduction. Russia suffered a horrendous number of dead soldiers within the first few weeks of the conflict, maybe up to 10,000. That’s the price of big arrows on modern battlefields with full intelligence/information/reconnaissance/artillery/drone coverage of the battlefields.
However, (up to) 10,000 dead is still a price that would have been worth paying to achieve the goals in Ukraine without going into a full-scale war. Had there been an agreement in Istanbul that would have terminated the conflict, ensured the rights of Russians in Ukraine, and kept Ukraine out of NATO and NATO out of Ukraine, one could remotely argue that “it was worth it.”
We all know what happened instead. As with all agreements that are not guaranteed with a gun on the West’s head, the West will ignore or scrap it at will. As happened with the Istanbul agreement.
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How George Bush and the CIA Almost Destroyed Russia in the 1990s
79 minutes readF. W. ENGDAHL—Putin did not need to describe “this.” Everyone present knew he meant the savage destruction of life, feeling of worth, and pride for most Russians after 1990. If anyone in the US or the EU thought about Putin’s comments—coming amid an unprecedented US and NATO vilification and demonization campaign against the Russian Federation and Putin personally, including economic sanctions—they most likely saw it as confirmation of Washington claims that Putin’s Russia was out to rebuild the Soviet Union.