The philosophical and legal foundation of the US government (and some other governments) is that government officials are the agents of the citizens—in the familiar phrase, those who govern have the “consent of the governed.” An agent, of course, is someone I authorize to act on my behalf. For a host of reasons, this doctrine has always been more or less absurd, but its absurdity has been placed in stark relief recently by the government’s mass spying, which violates the Constitution, various...

The New York Times is reporting that most Americans, including a majority in Florida, favor normalizing relations with Cuba, which would mean a lifting of cruel and brutal economic embargo that the U.S. government has been enforcing against the Cuban people for more than 50 years. It’s about time. Maybe Americans are finally figuring out that the embargo is an infringement on the rights and freedoms of the American people, including freedom of travel, freedom of association, and economic...

An unfortunate legacy of the Cold War is the negative attitude some American conservatives yet harbor toward Russia. Conditioned for decades to see Russia and the Soviet Union as synonymous, they still view post-communist Russia as a threat. They forget that Tsarist Russia was the most conservative great power, a bastion of Christian monarchy loathed by revolutionaries, Jacobins, and democrats. Joseph de Maistre was not alone among 19th-century conservatives in finding refuge and hope in...

The protests in the western Ukraine are organized by the CIA, the US State Department, and by Washington — and EU-financed Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that work in conjunction with the CIA and State Department. The purpose of the protests is to overturn the decision by the independent government of Ukraine not to join the EU. The US and EU were initially cooperating in the effort to destroy the independence of Ukraine and make it a subservient entity to the EU government in Brussels....

Three years ago, Washington experienced its own dose of “shock and awe” — the PR phrase used to sanitise its brutal invasion of Iraq — when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary Arabs took to the streets to demand the overthrow of leaders more interested in Washington’s approval than that of their own peoples. But American policy elites’ professed surprise was primarily a function of their own self-imposed amnesia and delusion. No one in Washington seemed to realise or care that...

The leaked private phone conversation between senior US State Department official Victoria Nuland and the American ambassador to Ukraine – in which Nuland is heard to disparage the European Union with a vulgar expletive – comes as a welcome relief. It is a moment of clarity, in which the US government inadvertently comes clean on its hidden agenda. All the elusive speculation about what Washington’s agenda in Ukraine is now laid to rest. Nuland’s own words make it clear that the US agenda is...

Any illusions some naïve soul may have had about the objectivity of the US media has been dispelled by their embarrassing performance at the Sochi Olympics: the chorus of whining complaints might as well have been written for them by the US State Department – which, come to think of it, is entirely within the realm of the possible given the imperious tone. The water, the toilets, the hotels – nothing pleases our pampered media divas, whose hatred of all things Russian oozes from between the...

President Obama’s state of the union pledge to “act with or without Congress” marks a milestone in presidential usurpation of Congressional authority. Most modern presidents have used executive orders to change and even create laws without Congressional approval. However President Obama is unusually brazen, in that most presidents do not brag about their plans to rule by executive order in state of the union speeches. Sadly, his pledge to use his pen to implement laws and policies without the...

"That's some pretty impressive tradecraft," said Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland of the interception and leak of her now-infamous call to US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoff Pyatt. The call consisted of the two plotting to install a US puppet government in Ukraine after overthrowing the current, democratically elected government. Tradecraft means "spycraft." In other words, Nuland was crediting a foreign intelligence service with impressive use of technology to be able to hack into her...

In the latest debacle for the US State Department and the Obama Administration, US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on tape micro-managing Ukraine opposition party strategies with US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. That the Ukraine regime-change operation is to some degree being directed from Washington can no longer be denied.The tape (listen below) was released today, on the eve of Nuland's second trip to meet with Ukrainian protestors and opposition leaders in...

The United States increases pressure on Ukraine while preparing sanctions against the country. It sends a high-level State Department official to visit the country only a month after her previous visit. US Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland is going to Kiev on Thursday, February 6. The event is coordinated with the European partners. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton will also visit Ukraine on February 5. According to US State Department’s statement,...

When Barack Obama was elected president, the chickens came home to roost above the sordid nest that conservatives made for us after the 9/11 attacks. It was after those attacks that conservatives, quivering and quaking in their shoes over the thought that the terrorists were coming to get us, traded away the freedom of the American people to the federal government in the hope of gaining safety and security from the terrorists. What were the terms of that fateful trade? They surrendered to...

In the late 1980s, the leaders of the west promised Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that they would not expand eastward if the Soviet Union pulled out of Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War. That promise was not kept. A triumphal West stuck it to the Soviet Union’s greatly weakened Russian successor, by incorporating the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO and the EU. But that was not enough to sate the lust of the neo-liberal triumphalists in search of a new imperium. Their...