Mercenaries

Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics.

On occasion of the CIA’s 70th anniversary, Lars Schall talked with US researcher Douglas Valentine about the Central Intelligence Agency. According to Valentine, the CIA is “the organized crime branch of the U.S. government”, doing the dirty work for the rich and powerful. Douglas Valentine is the author of the non-fictional, historical books The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, The Strength of the Wolf, The Strength of the Pack, and The CIA as Organized Crime.
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Alessandro Bianchi: The geographic location of Afghanistan has always occupied a central role. The April peace talks between Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Russia and China seemed to have put an end to the persistent and dominant American presence in the country. What’s your opinion?

I joined Robbie Martin to discuss the proposed plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan. We talk about the plan itself and the key players involved such as Erik Prince of Blackwater and Stephen Feinberg of Dyncorp.

This week on the New World Next Week: US sanctions Iran for no reason whatsoever; PM May urged to release UK-Saudi terror report; and garbagemen are the latest snitches in StasiMerica.

This week on the New World Next Week: US sanctions Iran for no reason whatsoever; PM May urged to release UK-Saudi terror report; and garbagemen are the latest snitches in StasiMerica.

In the first hour I am joined by JP Sottile of News Vandal for an in-depth conversation on the growing scandal involving Donald Trump Jr. We begin by touching on the latest person to have been in the infamous meeting, Ike Kaveladze, and his connection to a 2000 Congressional investigation into Russian money laundering operations. JP and I go beyond the headlines and try to decipher what this meeting might have actually been about. We offer up a more straight forward narrative that this was a meeting about corruption and payoffs.

Free trade, debt and war are all part of the same package, each feeding off the other. They are – each of them – rackets in their own right and they are all symptoms of the same problem. That problem has to do with the fact that our government  – along with the rest of the world  – has entirely forgotten the basic concept of how a national economy actually “earns” its way to prosperity.

Free Syrian Army fighters in Saqba, a suburb of Damascus (Photo: Freedom House/CC-BY-2.0)

Nothing justifies killing of innocent people.
— Tony Blair, CNN, 15th January 2015