americas

Now that mega-billionaire Bloomberg has realised the impossibility of being president of the United States, he has put his money behind Democrat and former vice-president Joe Biden who looks likely to be going to-to-toe with Trump for election in November. At first glance, he seems a reasonable enough candidate, as Bernie Sanders, who is now the only realistic Democrat alternative (and a longtime independent), is a self-described “democratic socialist” and the word socialist is anathema to an awful lot of American voters.

Will Idlib be the tipping point for Erdogan whose troops are certainly taking a beating from Russia? If it is, Russia will finalise the process of bringing Assad in from the cold, in line with Gulf Arabs’ plans. But it will be the end of the affair for Putin and Erdogan.

The royal family in the UK is having its very foundations shaken by both the controversial departure of Prince Harry and Meghan and now startling new revelations which compromise Prince Andrew even further, since his “car crash” interview with BBC, over his alleged relationship with a sex-trafficked child prostitute working for Jeffrey Epstein.

Brazil’s collusion between democratically-elected right-wing governments and the military is reminiscent of the region’s collective memory of dictatorships. However, the combination of government and military power will take the normalisation of human rights violations to an unprecedented level.

People have always wondered what makes America so paranoid. The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about it in 1964 in a famous Harper’s essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” that he later expanded into a book.

Right now the DNC is working hard to see if they can sabotage Sanders’ campaign by pressuring him to take a moderate stand – a change of position – on any one of his main pillars: universal healthcare, student debt cancellation, and the $15 an hour minimum wage.
The idea is to convince Sanders’ campaign strategists that in so doing, he will receive better media coverage from DNC friendly corporate outlets like CNN and MSNBC, and as a result of this moderation will become more electable for swing voters. But why would this sabotage his campaign?

Now that Bernie Sanders has been informed that the Kremlin is trying to support him (whether he likes it or not) he has officially become a viable candidate who may actually desire to make real systemic change. In a way the Russia connection accusation can now be worn as a badge of honour by Gabbard and Trump due to them truly being a limited threat to the status quo.

Those hapless individuals who run the United States are again slipping into a fantasy world where Americans are besieged by imaginary threats coming from both inside and outside the country. Of course, it is particularly convenient to warn of foreign threats, as it makes the people in government seem relevant and needed, but one might recommend that the tune be changed as it is getting a bit boring.

The ninth Democratic nationally televised debate between presidential candidates on Wednesday, February 19 proved to be a crucial one; Dramatic confrontations and melt-downs during it could be clearly seen to impact on the outcome of the Nevada state caucuses, which took place only three days later.
Nevada confirmed the main trends that had emerged in New Hampshire and Iowa, Senator Bernie Sanders, championing ideas so radical that President Franklin Roosevelt supported them 80 years ago, came first with an impressive 40.5 percent.

Reports that Donald Trump offered to pardon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if he could prove that Russia didn’t hack Democratic National Committee caused a good-sized media storm when they came out in a British court last week.  But then Dana Rohrabacher, the ex-US congressman supposedly serving as a go-between, issued an all-points denial, and the tempest blew over as fast as it arose.
But that doesn’t mean that the Russia-WikiLeaks story is kaput.  To the contrary, it’s still brimming with unanswered questions no matter how much the corporate media wishes they would go away.