JONATHAN KIRSHNER – Five Looming Geopolitical Crises of the Trump Administration

Foreign policy crises are inevitable, and no American president can prevent them from arising. But it is possible to provoke, mismanage, and even exacerbate them, making a fraught situation catastrophically worse. We are only here today in part because John F. Kennedy overruled the hotheads among his advisors—they were in the majority—during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the anxious heat …

RALPH NADER – Ready for the Jawboning Presidency of Donald Trump?

All signs point to Donald Trump becoming a jawboning president without equal in American history. That is, jawboning by exerting rhetorical bombast focused on people, corporations and institutions, with massive media propulsion behind the very personal presidency he will establish. It will be a natural daily extension of his boundless, easily bruisable ego. Trump has embraced these tactics as both …

MEL GOODMAN – Mad Dog Mattis and Trump’s “Seven Days in May”

President-elect Donald Trump probably never read Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey’s “Seven Days in May” in 1962 and never saw John Frankenheimer’s film version in 1964, which dealt with the threat of a military coup due to opposition to a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  President John F. Kennedy read the book after the …

Michael T. Bucci – Learning from the History of Presidential Elections: Barry Goldwater versus Donald Trump

Those old enough to have lived through the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis; attended the movies Dr. Strangelove, On The Beach and Seven Days In May; and experienced November 22-25, 1963 “as it happened”, might remember Senator Barry Goldwater’s nomination for the presidency on the GOP ticket in 1964. They might also remember the most famous ad in …

Paul Craig Roberts – The Impulsiveness of US Power

Washington’s impulsive use of power is a danger to America and to the world. Arrogant Washington politicians and crazed neoconservatives are screaming that the US must shoot down Russian aircraft that are operating against the US-supplied forces that have brought death and destruction to Syria, unleashing millions of refugees on Europe, in Washington’s effort to overthrow the Syrian government. Even …

Tom Engelhardt – Three Exceptional Facts About America

Given the cluttered landscape of the last 14 years, can you even faintly remember the moment when the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended in a stunned silence of shock and triumph in Washington, Eastern Europe was freed, Germany unified, and the Soviet Union vanished from the face of the Earth? At that epochal moment, six centuries of …

The Vinyl Experience – 09.04.15

Tom Chacon: American Dream
Bob Dylan: Maggie’s Farm
Bruce Springsteen: Out IN The Street
Van Morrison: I’ve Been Working
Spoon: Rent I Pay
Kinks: DEad End Street
Justin Townes Earle: One More Night In Brooklyn
Marianne Faithful: Working Class Hero
Ray La Montagne: Beg Steal Or Borrow
Passion Pit: Take A Walk
Elvis Costello: Welcome To The Working Week
Arcade Fire: The Suburbs
REM: Finest Worksong
The Clash: Career Opportunities
Weezer: Pork And Beans
Rolling Stones: Salt Of The Earth

JEFF GREENFIELD – Democratic Blue: Obama will leave his party in its worst shape since the Great Depression

s historians begin to assess Barack Obama’s record as president, there’s at least one legacy he’ll leave that will indeed be historic—but not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of the country. In fact, no president …

Behind the Greek Crisis By William R. Polk

Focusing exclusively on the monetary aspects of the Greek crisis the media misses much of what disturbs the Greeks and also what might make a solution possible. For over half a century, Greeks have lived in perilous times. In the 1930s, they lived under a brutal dictatorship that modeled itself on Nazi Germany, employing Gestapo-like secret police and sending critics …