IMPERIALIST FRONTS

BATKO MILACIC—Turkey, no matter how economically weaker than the United States, has shown that it is not a small nation that a “big boss” can discipline simply as it has in some other periods of history. The example of Turkish resistance to subordinate its policy to Washington interests is becoming dangerous, because the Turkish example of sovereignty of foreign policy and rebellion within the NATO pact can be followed by others.

Turkish nationalism got a new impetus by merging what previously seemed incompatible, and that is the greatest merit of US politics. With the failed Gulenist coup against Erdogan, Washington showed that it tried to treat this great nation as Haiti, which awakened Turkish national pride and opened the biggest gap in relations with the United States so far.

BILL VAN AUKEN—Moïse was shot dead at 1 a.m. by a commando squad armed with military-grade assault rifles. His wife, severely wounded, was flown via air ambulance to a trauma center in Florida. According to witnesses and an audio recording of the raid, the members of the death squad spoke English and Spanish.

Sustained gunfire was preceded by one of the members of the squad shouting out in American southern-accented English, “DEA operation! Everybody back up, stand down!”, an apparent ruse aimed at identifying the gunmen as members of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

The US State Department issued a denial that the assassins were American agents.

After the ceasefire on recent violence that dominated the world’s attention in May, following evictions and attacks in the zone of the Jerusalem Al Aqsa Mosque, signs of rising tensions have flared up again: Israeli nationalists announce a coming “flag march” in Jerusalem, while Hamas leaders vow to defend holy sites. What can the watching world do, to change the face of Israeli-Palestinian permanent-seeming conflict? Reaching beyond headlines and hashtags to explore these and other questions, we bring on distinguished guests – forensic scholar and political scientist Norman Finkelstein, and his sometimes co-author, Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of the Arab studies platform Jadaliyya.com. How can a movement like DiEM25 in Europe, interpret this conflict towards real change?

MATT EHRET—Another zero growth Trilateral Commission priest named Paul Volcker had only recently been appointed to head the Federal Reserve despite his repeated calls for a “controlled disintegration” of the U.S. economy when in 1979, his 20% interest rate hikes made capital investments into multi-year nuclear builds financially impossible for investors (especially when combined with the mountainous environmental impact red tape which added years onto the wait times of new constructions. Under these conditions, interest payments outpaced the actual cost of production and by the mid 1980s over 130 planned new reactor builds were cancelled. While it is popular to parrot the belief that it was the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown which resulted in the bad press and cancellation of new builds, the fact is that even before that event, 46 reactor builds had been cancelled between 1972 and 1979.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Actor Mark Ruffalo did a lot more to help restore the pro-Israel narrative by first opposing Israeli apartheid and then apologizing and saying his statements were being “used to justify antisemitism” than he ever could have done by just siding with Israel from the beginning. He gained a sympathetic ear from those who support Palestinian rights and then piped that drivel right into their brains, while giving virulent Zionists a narrative weapon to uphold with an “It’s good to admit when you’re wrong! I hope everyone can learn how wrong such statements are!”