PHYLLIS BENNIS—First came the lies. Rumsfeld’s false claims justifying war in Iraq continued and escalated. The inaugural lie, of course, was the entire premise that Iraq’s government was somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks. Assertion was easy, and with a mainstream media largely unwilling to challenge even known lies, there were few questions asked. Then came weapons of mass destruction, uranium yellowcake from Niger, Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes that could “only” be used for nuclear weapons production. The deception at the UN Security Council, where the supposed good guy among the Bush war criminals, Secretary of State Colin Powell, got up and lied to the council, lied to the American people, and lied to the world about what the United States “knew” about Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs.
Default Editor Patrice de Bergeracpas
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Essential Jimmy Dore in the Time of Friendly Fascism
6 minutes readJimmy Dore exposes the many faces of cynical fraudulence and creeping fascism in the US empire under liberal auspices (soon to become fully bipartisan, of course since it is a systemic project!).
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PEPE ESCOBAR—This treaty is at the heart of what is now officially described – by Moscow and Beijing – as a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era”. Such a broad definition is warranted because this is a complex multi-level partnership, not an “alliance”, designed as a counterbalance and viable alternative to hegemony and unilateralism.
A graphic example is provided by the progressive interpolation of two trade/development strategies, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), which Putin and Xi again discussed, in connection with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which was founded only three months before 9/11.
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PEPE ESCOBAR—The recent session of the National People’s Congress provides a stark example. Not only it approved a new Five-Year Plan, but in fact a full road map for China’s development up to 2035: three plans in one. What the whole world saw, in practice, was the manifest efficiency of the Chinese governance system, capable of designing and implementing extremely complex geoeconomic strategies after plenty of local and regional debate on a vast range of policy initiatives.
Compare it to the endless bickering and gridlock in Western liberal democracies, which are incapable of planning for the next quarter, not to mention fifteen years.
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PETER KOENIG—Over the past several decades, the United States, the UK and other western allies have continually sought to destabilize China by interfering in Taiwan, meaning in China’s internal affairs. The latest such events include the US weapons sale for US$ 5 billion to Taiwan in December 2020, and earlier this year, the U.S. Ambassador to the Pacific Island of Palau (Palau being one of the states recognizing Taiwan), became the first US envoy to travel to Taiwan in an official capacity, since Washington cut formal ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing in 1979.