The RPI Challenge

Nearly a year ago American whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the global scale of US government spying. With an annual budget of over $50 billion, the National Security Agency has the technology and the highest political backing to tap into any phone call, email or other electronic communication – anywhere and at anytime. Even, said Snowden, a president of the US is vulnerable to the NSA’s invasive spying power. Such is the agency’s totalitarian reach. Perhaps the most famous snoop...

Rep. Walter Jones, 20-year Republican of North Carolina, is one of America’s most courageous and honest politicians—putting him in a company that is virtually non-existent inside the beltway. He originally was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq War, but then he learned the facts, discovered the blatant lies the Cheney/Neocon cabal had used to sell it, and did the unthinkable. He broke with the Bush White House and became a relentless, informed, passionate and persuasive critic of not only...

It's a parody of democracy. It will damage the political process and hinder the prospects for peace. This is how Western leaders — their regional allies and also UN bigwigs — have dismissed the presidential elections in Syria set for June 3. It seems that despite having a choice of several candidates, the Syrian people having an election to decide for themselves who should be their country's president is a very bad thing. In the name of 'democracy', elections in Syria should only happen after...

(NY Times screen shot)The New York Times, which has asserted for weeks that the Russian government is behind the unrest in Ukraine’s east, finally sent some reporters to the region to dig up the proof, but all they found were eastern Ukrainians upset by the coup regime in Kiev that replaced President Viktor Yanukovych. The Times, which has been an unapologetic promoter of the “pro-democracy” uprising that ousted the democratically elected president through violent extra-constitutional means,...

Between the east and west of the Ukraine lies a historical highway, paved in unspeakable barbarism and blood. To the west it traverses the blood soaked black earth of the Ukrainian breadbasket where Stalin’s most heinous crime was committed–the savage liquidation of several million independent and enterprising peasants known as Kulaks. To the east it tracks the scorched earth route of Hitler’s Wehrmacht on its way to Stalingrad and the most barbaric military assault ever launched on the...

Did anyone really think that John Kerry’s nine-month effort to produce a Palestinian mini-state would ever work? If so, they were either ignorant of the Mideast, naïve, or deeply cynical. The best one could say about Kerry’s fiasco was that it was a charade designed to show America’s Arab allies that Washington was really making an effort to resolve the nearly seven-decade suffering of the 5 million homeless Palestinians. In 2002, I wrote that the latest Arab-Israel peace initiative – called...

The Senate is considering legislation to shift the war power largely to the president and a 20-person legislative committee. The result would undermine the constitutional role of 515 other members of Congress and the duty they have to represent the interests of their constituents. The stated purpose of S. 1939, introduced by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Angus King (I-Maine), is to repeal the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and create a procedure that allows for rapid...

Last week World Bank economists predicted that China would soon displace the United States as the world’s largest economy. The fact that this one-time economic basket case is now positioned to surpass the US is one more sign of the damage done to American prosperity by welfare, warfare, corporatism, and fiat money. Some commentators have predicted that China’s reign as the world’s largest economy would not last long. This may be true. While China has made great strides since adopting...

It looks like the civil war in Ukraine is getting much worse. Western Ukraine right now is being urged on by its Western supporters, meaning its NATO supporters, the European Union, the United States, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Western Ukraine has moved to take back control of the cities in Eastern Ukraine that have been taken over by supporters of Russia. Of course, it’s said in the major media that Russia has started all of this trouble, and so all this has to be done. The...

The EU’s Eastern Partnership summit that took place in Prague on 24-25 April was called to solve the Hamlet question of whether the programme itself is to be or not to be. It was unable to do so, however. The collapse of the Ukrainian government and the cooling of relations between the EU and Belarus have virtually left just Georgia and Moldova in the orbit of the Eastern Partnership, although Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev also took an active part in the recent summit. For the European...

There is yet another victory for the national security state under President Obama. The Obama Administration has succeeded, with the help of Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, in quietly removing a provision that would seem unobjectionable to a President who pledged “the most transparent Administration in history.” The provision simply required disclosure of the number of people killed each year by U.S. drone attacks. Not the details mind you. Just the figure. That sent the...

Once again Americans are watching their government involve itself in an issue in which the United States has nothing at stake economically and no genuine national security interest at risk. Ukraine is a place that is worth neither a single American dollar nor more than a brief scan of the headlines by US citizens. And yet Obama and his fellow European interveners and democracy mongers are conducting themselves in a bellicose manner that could lead to some kind of military conflict in eastern...

Earlier this month, CIA-operated drones killed as many as 55 people in Yemen in several separate strikes. Although it was claimed that those killed were “militants,” according to press reports at least three civilians were killed and at least five others wounded. That makes at least 92 US drone attacks against Yemen during the Obama administration, which have killed nearly 1,000 people including many civilians. The latest strikes seem to contradict President Obama’s revised guidelines for...

Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado — two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February — have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to...