News Commentary

Peter Schiff on Politics, Precious Metals and President Obama’s Second Term

"Daily Bell: Talk about your father, who is now in jail as a tax protestor. How is he doing? Peter Schiff: He's hanging in there. He's 84. He turns 85 next month. I think he's a political prisoner. He's in jail not because he really violated the law but because he represented a threat to the government's illegal collection of income taxes. So I think it's very unfortunate that my father is in jail and I think it says a lot about the character of our country when we can have a political prisoner." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingPeter Schiff on Politics, Precious Metals and President Obama’s Second Term

Pepe Escobar: Burn, burn – Africa’s Afghanistan

"Business is good; French president Francois Hollande spent this past Tuesday in Abu Dhabi clinching the sale of up to 60 Rafales to that Gulf paragon of democracy, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The formerly wimpy Hollande - now enjoying his 'resolute', 'determined', tough guy image reconversion - has cleverly sold all this as incinerating Islamists in the savannah before they take a one-way Bamako-Paris flight to bomb the Eiffel Tower. According to the UN Office of Drugs Control, 60% of Europe's cocaine transits Mali." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingPepe Escobar: Burn, burn – Africa’s Afghanistan

On To Timbuktu II

"This bloody action has awoken Algeria’s hitherto quiescent Islamic resistance groups. They waged a ten year war against Algeria’s US and French backed military regime, one of the continent’s most repressive regimes, after Algeria’s armed forces crushed Islamists after they won a fair election in 1991. Over 250,000 Algerians died in a long, bloody civil war. The Algiers government often used gangs of its soldiers disguised as rebel fighters to commit gruesome massacres to blacken the name of the opposition. Algeria may again be headed for a new bloodbath, this time with minority Berber people calling for their independent state." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingOn To Timbuktu II

Africa’s Resources Beckon

"For the USA, its ambitions have a new locus in Africa. These wars, as in Libya and Mali, have not been joined by this trio of imperialists because of terrorism threatening Europe or the U.S. This is, for one thing, about controlling African governments and enabling the extraction of wealth from resources in this region of Africa. It was Gaddafi's (Libya's) sympathy and outreach toward these regions and peoples that helped bring about his downfall. He stood in the way of western business interests, and his ideas for controlling the resources for Africans could not be abided by the western business interests and their allies in government." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingAfrica’s Resources Beckon

Who Says You Can Kill Americans, Mr. President?

"Presidents had never before, to our knowledge, targeted specific Americans for military strikes. There are no court decisions that tell us if he is acting lawfully. Mr. Obama tells us not to worry, though, because his lawyers say it is fine, because experts guide the decisions and because his advisers have set up a careful process to help him decide whom he should kill. He must think we should be relieved. Oddly, under current law, Congress and the courts are involved when presidents eavesdrop on Americans, detain them or harshly interrogate them — but not when they kill them." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingWho Says You Can Kill Americans, Mr. President?

Michael Scheuer: In Mali, the interventionist establishment already is lying about “unintended consequences”

"When the relentless, war-causing interventionists in those places decided to remove Gadhafi in favor of a 'democratic revolution' that did not exist in Libya, or in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Pakistan, Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world, they ushered in everything that has happened since, and if they knew anything about history, the region, and the Islamist movement they would have known it. How could these genius Western interventionists know that they were deliberately opening Pandora’s Islamist Box? A few facts that should have been obvious to anyone with a bit of commonsense make a claim of 'unintended consequences' preposterous in the extreme." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingMichael Scheuer: In Mali, the interventionist establishment already is lying about “unintended consequences”

Gun Violence is Not a Republican Problem

"67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average. Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. Those are the places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. And many of them have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingGun Violence is Not a Republican Problem

An Ally Out of Control

"The U.S. previously had correctly warned that Western attacks on the Islamist enclave in Mali could inflame Islamic militants worldwide and lead to blowback terrorist attacks in the West. Yet now, in a replay of the war in Libya, with France forcing its hand, the U.S. has been forced to back its ally’s aggressive action and even provide help. Northern Mali was taken over by battle-hardened Islamists, who brought in heavy weapons from Gaddafi’s formidable stockpiles in Libya after the West’s overthrow of him. The U.S. foolishly had trained Malian units led by generals who were Tuareg, an ethnic group that been rebelling against the Malian government for a half century." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingAn Ally Out of Control

Glenn Greenwald: MLK’s vehement condemnations of US militarism are more relevant than ever

"Obama's policies are a manifestation of exactly the militaristic mindset which King so eloquently denounced. Obama has always been fond of invoking King's phrase 'fierce urgency of now', yet ironically, that is lifted from this anti-war speech, one that stands as a stinging repudiation of the continuous killing and violence Obama has spent the last four years unleashing on many countries around the world (Max Blumenthal suggested that Obama's second inaugural speech be entitled 'I have a drone')." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingGlenn Greenwald: MLK’s vehement condemnations of US militarism are more relevant than ever