WORLD DESK

There is a joke going around Italy these days, after the latest Iranian developments: Italy doesn’t really need a foreign minister, since the position is already taken by a guy named Mike Pompeo, whose origins are, after all, Italian. Pompeo seemingly spent two days on the phone doing his best to inform European allies of what happened, but didn’t have time for a call to his Italian counterpart. Seriously, why bother?

JASON HIRTHLER—Hong Kong is ablaze. Venezuelan streets are thousands-strong with Bolivarians. Gilets Jaunes crowd the cobbled avenues of French capitals. Hondurans are rattling their neoliberal conman. Yet we hear only about the flour-pure pleas of innocent Asians whose petrol bombs bear the stamp of democracy, but not of a Latin demos chanting to loose the chains of imperial sanctions. Only those uprisings that can be suitably cloaked in free-market groupthink are cast in the spotlight.

THE SAKER—It will be interesting to see if the current G7 will ever agree to mutate into a new G10 which would make Russia, China and India the most powerful block (or voting group) of this new forum. I personally doubt it very much, but then they are becoming desperate and Macron’s words seem to be indicating that this option is at least being discussed behind closed doors. Frankly, considering how quickly the G7 is becoming utterly irrelevant, I expect it to be gradually phased out and replaced by the (objectively much more relevant) G20.

ELLEN BROWN—The Japanese state-guided market system was effective and efficient—so effective that it was regarded as an existential threat to the neoliberal model of debt-based money and “free markets” promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to author William Engdahl in “A Century of War,” by the end of the 1980s, Japan was considered the leading economic and banking power in the world. 

GEORGE ELIASON—More than 70 percent of the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA is staffed by green badge contractors. The majority of personnel at the DIA, the CIA National Clandestine Service, the National Counter Terrorism Center, and more than 80% of the NSA budget goes to private contractors. All of the agencies are filled with what amounts to day labor. How many of them already have the keys to the barn that potentially starts the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse on their way?