Insights

Maybe it makes me unsophisticated, but I don’t think about the stock market that much. I know that many say it’s the central nervous system of our economy. I know its estimated worth is around $30 trillion. And I know that when it tanks, the lives of millions of Americans are wrecked, ruined and upended. I know that when that happens, the powerful millionaires (and billionaires) who caused said destruction generally grab their money and their well-coiffed dogs and run for it.

The Trump administration has brought U.S. foreign policy to the brink of crisis if it has not already tipped into one. There is little room to argue otherwise. In Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and in Washington’s ever-fraught relations with Russia, U.S. strategy, as reviewed in my previous column, amounts to little more than spoiling the efforts of others to negotiate peaceful solutions to war and dangerous standoffs in the interests of an orderly world.

Long-time Republican Party political strategists are having fits. If only we could get average Americans to focus in on the economy instead of The Donald, they’re telling all comers, the GOP would do just fine in the upcoming November midterm elections.
Those Republican strategists should be careful what they wish for. Getting average Americans to focus in on the economy ought to be the last thing in the world they want voters to do.

Every journalist would like to start a report with the words: “All quiet on the western front.” Or the eastern front. And I had actually scribbled “all quiet on the northern front” in my notebook, on my rural way to the far northern village of Kansabba on Syria’s front line opposite Idlib province, when an artillery piece in the forest banged off a shell over our heads. It took 25 seconds for the sound of the explosion – on the hills to the north-east – to echo softly back to us through the trees. Then a second round. And a third. A few Syrian soldiers on motorcycles purred along the road.

The Resistance is steering so much of the left into a hard-right turn — including even Pacifica’s KPFA Radio-Berkeley.
On July 22 this year, nearly two years after Trump’s election and the rise of “The Resistance,” I tuned in to KPFA-Berkeley’s Sunday Show and heard host Philip Maldari speaking to The Nation’s national affairs correspondent John Nichols:

In an op-ed published last week in the German newspaper Handelsblatt, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas declared that the “the US and Europe have been drifting apart for years.” Nowhere is this clearer than in the disagreement between the United States and Europe over the fate of the Iran nuclear deal.

A list of 26 predominantly Muslim countries considered sensitive by China reflects Chinese concerns that they could reinforce religious sentiment among the People’s Republic’s Turkic Muslim population with potentially far-reaching consequences if the Islamic world were to take it to task for its crackdown in Xinjiang, the most frontal assault on Islam in recent history.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Moscow Has Upped the Ante in Syria
 
Mr. President:

Traditionally, the Palestinian problem is considered by the international community (or rather’ by those politicians, UN officials, experts and journalists who call themselves so, dealing with it for generations and largely creating it) as the struggle of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and Hamas (or Ramallah and Gaza) with Israel for the creation of a Palestinian state, within the framework of the “Oslo Accords” or outside of them.

4,000,000,029,057. Remember that number. It’s going to come up again later. But let’s begin with another number entirely: 145,000 — as in, 145,000 uniformed soldiers striding down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s the number of troops who marched down that very street in May 1865 after the United States defeated the Confederate States of America.