The RPI Challenge

Hong Kong protest activists Joshua Wong Chi-fung seen meeting Julie Eadeh, political chief of US Consulate.After a viral photo surfaced this week revealing continuing contact between well-known Hong Kong pro-independence protest leaders and a US diplomatic officer, China has summoned US consulate officials stationed in the city, Bloomberg reports. According to a statement from Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong, Chinese officials asked the Americans to...

The US continues to escalate its anti-Venezuela measures this week, having announced Monday night that sanctions have grown to an economic embargo, and now that appears to include a naval blockade. Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez announced on Wednesday that the United States had seized a cargo ship bound for Venezuela in the Panama Canal. The ship was carrying soy cakes for the production of food.US officials as yet have not commented, but it’s not clear under what pretext they...

This past weekend, 22 people were killed in El Paso, Texas and 9 in Dayton, Ohio. There have been a number of other mass shootings in the past two decades or so; the largest was in Las Vegas in 2017, with 58 killed. This is sad, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the real perpetrators of death in America - the US military. It has been well-said that “it’s time for America to reckon with the staggering death toll of the post 9-11 wars.” Brown University’s Costs of War Project this month...

The US Empire, which controls much of the world through hundreds of military bases in foreign countries, through foreign regimes run by domestic US puppets, and through foreign dependency on US foreign aid, got its start in 1898 during the Spanish American War. It was that war that enabled the Empire to acquire its imperialist domain in Cuba known as Guantanamo Bay, which is now the Empire’s premier international indefinite-detention prison, torture center, and kangaroo judicial system. The...

Here we go again, another phase of witch-hunting over “Who lost _____(fill in the blanks) country.” It was once who lost China in 1949, then Cuba in 1959, then Iran in 1979, and others. The latest iteration is now “Who lost Turkey?” This question classically pops up whenever a country we thought was firmly locked into the “American camp” suddenly turns against us. Washington policy makers indeed seem to believe that, among rational nations, strategic allegiance with the US is in the natural...

Two mass shootings have rocked the United States in less than 24 hours, leaving dozens dead and many more wounded. The first in El Paso, Texas was allegedly perpetrated by a white supremacist whose racist motives are outlined in a rambling “manifesto”, the second allegedly by a self-described “leftist” whose motives, like the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, are presently unknown. These incidents occurred a week after another mass shooting in Gilroy, California. All the usual US gun control debates...

With a national debt approaching $23 trillion and a trillion dollar deficit for this year alone, Congress last week decided to double down on suicidal spending, passing a two year budget that has the United States careening toward catastrophe. While we cannot say precisely when the economic crash will occur, we do know that it is coming. And last week Congress pounded down on the accelerator.We are told that the US economy is experiencing unprecedented growth, while at the same time the Fed is...

At a time when the Trump administration has no problem negotiating with the secretary of the Russian national security council Nikolai Patrushev, who is technically under US sanctions since April 2018, the cut and thrust of Washington’s move to sanction Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif needs to be understood properly. How did US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo try to explain the dispatch of Zarif to perdition? Pompeo’s statement on Wednesdayattributed to Zarif a singular sin: a)...

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), in a Thursday interview with host Chris Cuomo at CNN, reacted to criticism from fellow Democratic presidential candidate Sen Kamala Harris (D-CA), after the candidates’ dust-up in a debate the day before, by stating, "the only response that I have heard her and her campaign give is to push out smear attacks on me, claim that I am somehow some kind of foreign agent or a traitor to my country, the country that I love, the country that I put my life on the line to...

President Trump, wandering further afield of his noninterventionist election campaign promise, may soon impose an illegal military blockade on Venezuela. According to an unnamed Trump administration official, the blockade will continue until Nicolas Maduro abdicates and Juan Guaido becomes the neoliberal recognized leader. In response, Maduro said he’s “ready for battle,” whatever that means. Maduro repudiates #Trump's quarantine threat, says #Venezuela ready for battle https://t.co/7I6N4QPyQj...

The second debate among Democratic hopefuls was notable for two things. The lack of common decency of most of them and Tulsi Gabbard’s immense, career-ending attack on Kamala Harris’ (D-Deep State) record as an Attorney General in California. Harris came out of the first debate the clear winner and Gabbard cut her down to size with one of the single best minutes of political television since Donald Trump told Hillary Clinton, “Because you’d be in jail.” Gabbard’s takedown of Harris was so spot...

While hysteria raged about possible Russian “interference” in the 2016 US election, British intelligence officials were secretly playing a “key role” in helping instigate investigations into Donald Trump, secret texts have shown. 'Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign country interfering in American affairs,' former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the ‘Russiagate’ investigation. The Guardian...

When Buzzfeed's Rosie Gray contacted Dr. Paul yesterday for a comment for her latest piece, "Tulsi Gabbard Is This Election’s Ron Paul," Dr. Paul and I discussed what the article might look like and how his comment might be used (or mis-used). Knowing Gray as an obsessive "Russiagate" promoter and manic never-Trumper, my view was that she would distort any Ron Paul quote to make it look bad for Gabbard, who Gray and the rest of the establishment journalists despise. He declined to comment....

The Tehran government has announced the arrest of seventeen Iranian citizens caught spying for America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some of those arrested have already been sentenced to death. It is the third major roll-up of CIA agents in Iran that I have been aware of, the first occurring in 1991 involved 20 American agents. The second episode in 2011 led to the arrest of 30 spies. The earlier arrests reportedly eliminated what were presumed to be the entire networks of American...

When the US instigates its so called 'color revolutions', the transatlantic main stream media are usually supportive. But the support is rarely as extreme as the extraordinary one the New York Times gives to the rioters in Hong Kong. For the timeline we check with Wikipedia on the 2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests: Demonstrations against the bill first occurred in March and April, but greatly expanded in scale and intensity beginning in June. At least 240,000 people (up to one...