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Journalists Camila Escalante & Ben Norton join us live from Nicaragua to talk about the elections that just took place and what the Western media won’t tell you about them. Then journalist Danny Haiphong talks about getting shut down by Twitter over Keith Olbermann tweets and Wyatt Reed talks about getting called a “wh*re” by Keith Olbermann.

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.” 

In 2009, while Qaddafi was acting head of the African Union, he planned to create a gold-backed African currency to compete with the dollar and euro. Oil and all resources in Africa would be traded in Gold. 

Until the US-NATO invasion, the gold dinar was issued by the Central Bank of Libya (CBL). The Libyan bank was 100% state-owned and independent. Foreigners had to go through the CBL to do business with Libya. The Central Bank of Libya issued the dinar, using the country’s 143.8 tons of gold.

Qaddafi’s plan would have strengthened the whole continent of Africa in the eyes of economists backing sound money, but it would have been especially devastating for the US economy, the American dollar, and particularly the elite in charge of the system.

Sometimes a single article or video can teach far more about the complicated and shifting reality we inhabit than all the bloviating we see on the Establishment TV and print channels. This is the case with these two videos by Jimmy Dore, impeccably supported by a formidable journalist, Max Blumenthal (The Grayzone), whose capacity to peel off the layers of deception cynically manufactured by the imperial system has few equals. Watch these closely and learn.  There are important facts and lessons here, and valuable confirmations for those who have been longtime critics of the capitalist system and its myriad social morbidities. 

PEPE ESCOBAR—ISIS-K, which sports a global jihadi mindset, has typically viewed the Taliban as a group of dirty nationalists. Earlier jihadi members used to be recruited from the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Yet now, apart from former soldiers, they are mostly young, disaffected urban Afghans, westernized by trashy pop culture.

It’s been hard for ISIS-K to establish the narrative that the Taliban are western collaborators – considering that the NATO galaxy continues to antagonize and/or dismiss the new rulers of Kabul.