coup

On this episode Christoph and I start off with our favorite Georgian politician, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his most recent meddling in his native country.  While ostensibly operating as governor of Odessa, Saakashvili was recently caught on tape advising the owner and director of popular TV station Rustavi 2 on how to instigate a violent confrontation with the goverment.  The pro-Saakashvili channel has been in a long legal dispute and the current regime has trued multiple times to shut it down.  Christoph explains what is at stake for Rustavi 2 and how Saakashvili has been inserting himself

CNN released a new poll yesterday, but there were no questions about the presidential primaries per se. Question #34 was: "Do you happen to know what religion Barack Obama is? Is he Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, something else, or not religious?" Although it was a plurality, only 39% got it right-- Obama is Protestant/Christian. The second biggest answer-- at 29%-- was Muslim.

I have always liked this country of red earth, mighty rivers and rough cobblestone streets. I have liked its bougainvillea, its long silent nights, and its endless open spaces.
But almost everything that could went wrong for the Paraguayan people, or at least for its indigenous majority.
Before Evo Morales became the President, Bolivia had been the most destitute country in South America. Paraguay was slightly “above it” – the second poorest nation. Now, most likely, it is the most deprived.
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Mrs. Simone Gbagbo, the former first lady of Ivory Coast, made an appearance in court inside the country on December 26. She is charged with alleged crimes in connection with the tenure of her husband, the ousted President Laurent Gbagbo, who is now under the custody of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

On this week’s episode we spoke with our good friend Tom Secker the host of ClandesTime.  Tom and I discussed John Frankenheimer’s  1964 classic, Seven Days in May.  Made at the behest of John F.

The NATO proxy war in the Ukraine started with the violent US-EU-sponsored overthrow of the elected government via a mob putsch in February 2014. This was well financed at $5 billion, according to President Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland.

I lived through an unarmed socialist revolution that lasted for one thousand days.
As a teenager I witnessed the electoral triumph of President Allende and I was still a teenager when I witnessed his killing and the destruction of his popular program and everything around him. Airplanes destroying buildings in downtown Santiago, schools with no arms, a beer battle, and cats shooting at police while the bloody hand of a mad US foreign policy was all over it.

Interviews with senior Labor Party figures, both past and present, published in the new book Triumph and Demise by the Australian newspaper’s leading political journalist Paul Kelly, cast a further revealing light on the circumstances surrounding the June 23-24, 2010 coup that ousted Labor leader Kevin Rudd as prime minister and installed Julia Gillard.

When President Obama requested $3.7 billion from Congress in early July he returned the issue of border security to the forefront where it had faded since the days of large scale Mexican migration a few years ago. The exodus from Mexico stemmed from the signing of NAFTA in 1994 which pitted Mexican corn farms, long a staple of the Mexican economy, against an influx of heavily subsidized corn inputs from the U.S. Over two million Mexicans left agriculture and many headed north, drawn by the Sunbelt building boom.