[…] one political party in the US, with two wings, is only half true. I don’t want to sound too naive here, but whereas the Democratic administrations (Carter, Clinton) mostly tried to do things for the common good as they perceived it (within the limitations imposed by their sources of finance), behind the Republican rhetoric […]
On 8 July the Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, announced that the Libyan Government accepted ‘general responsibility’ for the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and normal diplomatic relations with Libya were being restored. The media reporting of this accepted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spin that it meant the Libyans have admitted killing Fletcher. The […]
Roundtable I get regular e-mail bulletins from an organisation called the roundtable – not the Round Table but somebody? some people? – trying to document the US ruling elite by the study of its organisations. Really they should be called Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – because it is the CFR they mostly write about; […]
[…] how it commissions and disseminates phoney research, runs smear campaigns and psy-ops, gerrymanders electoral districts, and steals elections. There are fairly detailed studies of the campaigns against Clinton and of the Florida election-theft, but this is a thick skim made by experts: a detailed account would run to thousands of pages. This network’s enemies […]
Votescam (again) Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we – readers of magazines like Lobster – are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the […]
[…] FSA and the companies, they would never be told anything. The problem was they didn’t have the proper resources to find out for themselves.’(10) (emphases added) The Clinton administration’s part in the drama In the New York Times of 30 September 1999 in ‘Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending’, Steven A. Holmes […]
Dangerous Liaison Between EU Institutions and Industry This is the first publication of Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), an Amsterdam-based foundation which will ‘monitor and report on the activities of European corporations and their lobby groups’. Very nicely produced and illustrated, this is 72 A-4 pages and costs £5.00 in the U.K. and US $10.00 in […]
[…] of the US strategic furniture. Despite mounting near-unilateral military efforts in Iraq and the Balkans, the doctrinal case for pre-emption found few takers in a decidedly risk-averse Clinton administration. Steeped in the ‘institutionalist’ tradition in US foreign policy, Clinton/Gore were uninterested in missile defence and had little rapport with a Pentagon still firmly wedded […]
The articles on Blairism and contamination in Lobster 33 are tremendously useful in understanding the recent political changes in the UK, and also in understanding ‘fusion paranoia’ as a cross-contamination argument. Maybe it’s not a conspiracy, but it’s surely not a coincidence that the fusion idea was first put forth by New Yorker, a champion […]
Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism Edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003, £14.95 The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair Oakland (US) and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003, £9.00/$12.95 The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century Scott […]
