VIDEO

THE SAKER—First, Putin and Lavrov have as a policy to talk to (almost) everybody (“Ze” being the current exception).  This is the Russian way of diplomacy: talk to mutual mortal enemies like Israel and Iran, and talk to non-entities like Schultz or Truss.  The Kremlin does not care how hard Lavrov or Putin need to “hold their mental noses” when talking to dishonorable, cowardly, liars if that gets them some tangible benefit (more about that in a sec). And the Russians will always do everything in their power to avoid war, small or big.

For more than a century the US has victimised Nicaragua and many other nations in Latin America, including Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil and so on. The object has always been the same, to overthrow those forces and leaders that would give the people a better deal in the share of their national wealth.  That wealth, in Washington’s view, has always belonged to the same super-rich individuals and corporations that own the American government and control its destiny. “Too bad for Latin America,” said Bolivar. “So far from God and so close to the United States.” 

Alexander Mercouris discusses how China is no longer willing to take unending insults from the West, especially the US, and is now organising itself to respond in kind with its own information war capabilities. Also, as Special Addendum: A documentary on China’s transformation by PBS, the supposedly “mature and impartial” platform that never stoops to imperial propaganda. The fact is that PBS has also tangibly degenerated in the last two decades, and its prestige programs such as the Newshour and Frontline (inevitable given their corporate funding, staffing, etc.) have become only marginally less openly tendentious and mendacious than the regular commercial media. So they use the stiletto instead of the hammer, but the results are often the same: the conscious betrayal of truth. Be careful, therefore, as you watch this video. There’s the usual mix of lies and truths, with the latter often further massaged to diminish their impact.

AARON MATÉ: So all these admissions by top Biden officials help expose one of the biggest lies about the Obama administration, where many of them served. And that line that we often hear about Obama is that he did not do enough in Syria. He did not intervene enough. It’s the exact opposite. As all these officials have laid out, Obama massively intervened in Syria primarily through a covert, giant CIA program. And that has led to the chaos that Syria is still recovering from today. And it was so cynical that the US was willing to use al-Qaeda and ISIS to advance their goals of regime change.
And this takes me to another Biden official named Rob Malley, who served under Obama and is now Biden’s envoy to Iran in the hopes of possibly reviving the Iran nuclear deal — although whether Biden will do that, is actually unclear. But listen to what Rob Malley told me in an interview we did back in 2018. Contrary to the dominant line that Obama didn’t do enough in Syria, Malley told me that in fact, the US was a part of what fueled the war, rather than stopping it.

CALEB MAUPIN—Biden’s transition team is liable to be headed by Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, a man known for his fascistic thinking.  Contrary to the image of geeks working out a garage and making billions through their sheer genius, Maupin shows that Silicon Valley and the computer revolution were not spawned by free market dynamics, but actually the opposite, a creation of the US government’s most secretive agencies—CIA, NSA, etc.—determined to gain supremacy in the development and control of information technology.

Silicon Valley is so libertarian, so unrooted in any sense of loyalty or obligation to society or the nation, that Trump himself and Bannon, spousing economic nationalism, fear and distrust this peculiar subculture.