Wednesday, June 13th, 2018
Patrick Wintour, Diplomatic Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is the view from the U.K. , and it is not a happy story. And there will be others. Polls in all these countries show that the view of America is severely tarnished.
Donald Trump leaves the G7 summit in La Malbaie, Quebec
Credit: Canadian Press/Rex/Shutterstock
Who was there?
The G7 is attended by the leaders of the seven main western economies, and has been seen as a chance for world leaders to discuss the chief diplomatic and economic issues of the day. Leaders from the US, France, Canada, Germany Japan, Italy and the UK attend. EU officials also attend, as do chiefs from multilateral bodies such as the IMF. Russia used to attend the event, but it was blackballed following the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Since its inception in 1975, its tone is supposed to be gentle – as much fireside chat as firefighting. A G7 shibboleth is support for free trade, and a rules-based world order.
Donald Trump’s now infamous blow-up occurred as much before and after the summit, as during it.
In the run-up, the US president announced he was slapping tariffs on EU steel and […]
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Wednesday, June 13th, 2018
Serge Halimi, President and Editorial Director of Le Monde diplomatique. - Le Monde diplomatique
Stephan: And finally, the view from France. I have run all of these pieces together because I want my readers to get what I am not seeing elsewhere, a full the spectrum of the responses to Trump's ill-considered behavior. It's only when one sees it this way that how badly conceived it was registers.
Emmanuel Macron
All Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson’s entreaties and demonstrations of affection to President Donald Trump were utterly pointless. He responded by humiliating them. Now, he threatens trade and financial reprisals if they fail to break the deal their countries made with Iran three years ago. Trump has reversed the US’s position, and its allies must fall into line. Seen from Washington, the UK, France and Germany are unimportant, or anyway far less important than Saudi Arabia or Israel.
In Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom), Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: ‘When a man admits his guilt, you always feel like hitting him, to smash what little dignity he has left.’ That holds true for countries, including those of the European Union. Macron says he refuses to talk ‘with a gun to [his] head]’, while Merkel finds it unfortunate that Trump has made things ‘even more difficult’ in the Middle East. Yet neither seems able to respond with anything but whining. Europe’s major business corporations feel obliged to comply with […]
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Lynn Parramore, - Institute for New Economic Thinking
Stephan: Here is a fully developed exegetic essay on how Neo-feudalism is being constructed. As the essay says, "Nobody can say we weren’t warned."
Economist James McGill Buchanan
Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.
James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.
The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a […]
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Stephan: We are in a new internet age. My prediction: costs will go up, higher fees will result in better service. There will also be sites that are blocked or charged higher fees. The net effect will be to fundamentally undercut a free and uncensored media. This is just another step in the unraveling of American democracy, and the emergence of Neo-feudalism.
Credit: Michael Bocchieri/Getty Images
Monday, June 11, is the first day of the post–net neutrality internet. In December, the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal the Obama-era rules that prohibit internet companies from slowing down or speeding up access to certain websites, but it took about six months for the repeal to get a signoff from the Office of Management and Budget and for the new rules to be published in the federal register. Beginning, well, now, your internet access could—emphasis on could—feel dramatically different than it did yesterday.
Under the new network neutrality rules, internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T are allowed to throttle traffic that travels over their network or even block access to entire websites as long as the companies alert subscribers in their terms of service that they reserve the right to do so. But since most people in the United States don’t have more than one or two internet providers to choose from for […]
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Chas Danner, - New York Magazine
Stephan: I am appalled that neither Democratic nor Republican politicians seem to understand that the psychophysiology of politics has become the new field of warfare. Perhaps it's because people like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi and, of course, Donald Trump, are simply too old and too unsophisticated about electronic media to grasp the concept or the neuroscience.
Whatever the reason I think the evidence is overwhelming that Russia both skewed the American 2016 election in favor of Trump, as well as the UK BREXIT vote, and that there were linkages between both efforts, and the politicians who benefited from these manipulations. Here is the latest validating that conclusion.
Leave.EU donor Arron Banks at a press conference in November 2015.
Credit: Leon Neal/AFP
Concerns about Russia’s election meddling — in the U.K. — reached new heights on Saturday after leaked emails revealed extensive links between one of the top backers of a pro-Brexit campaign and Russian officials. The Observer and Sunday Times of London obtained the some 40,000 emails sent by millionaire businessman Arron Banks, the chief financial backer of U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign, and Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s director of communications.
The emails show show that Banks had previously undisclosed meetings with Russia’s U.K. ambassador (which were set up by an alleged Russian spy), and had made a previously undisclosed visit to Moscow at the peak of the Brexit campaign. Banks and Wigmore were also offered, at one point, a business deal involving several Russian goldmines that could have been worth a fortune for the men, according to the documents. There is a Trump connection, as the Sunday […]
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