Author Archives: Eric Zuesse

The progressive investigative journalist, Julia Rock, at The Daily Poster, opined on November 15, “The most effective tool that governments have to limit carbon emissions is to make it more difficult to finance fossil fuel development.” That’s a viewpoint which I had documented to be true — and explained how it could easily be implemented — in my July 25 article, “The Only Way to Stop Global Warming”. But when I had submitted that article to The Daily Poster, they failed to publish it. Continue reading →

As the great anonymous investigative journalist who writes the “Moon Over Alabama” blog documented on October 9, U.S. President Donald Trump signed, on October 8, Executive Order 13902, which will apply crushing penalties to any entity which trades with Iran, and this will finally close off the entry of food and medicine into Iran, so as to complete the destruction of Iran that has already been done previously by Trump and the U.S. Congress (the sanctions resolutions), and by the global coronavirus epidemic. Continue reading →

U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told Europeans, in statements on July 29th and August 9, “I’ve said that very publicly, I’ve said that very privately to my counterparts as well, about the importance of NATO, any alliance, sharing the burden so that we can all deter Russia and avoid peace in Europe.’” Continue reading →

The U.S. does vastly more foreign invasions, and political subversions, and coups, around the world, than any other nation does, and none of the countries we’ve invaded and overthrown had ever invaded the U.S.—these are all brutal international aggressions, and they have destroyed each of the countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and numerous others. The coups that the U.S. perpetrated have likewise destroyed many countries, starting in Thailand in 1948, then Syria in 1949, then Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and extending right up to the U.S. coup in Ukraine in February 2014, after which Ukraine’s GDP plunged by 50% and stayed down for years and still hasn’t recovered from the civil war and other destruction that the U.S. government caused in that country. (Furthermore, repeatedly, in 2013, and in 2017, and even going back as far as 2003, global polling around the world has shown that the U.S. comes out way on top for being the “biggest threat to peace” of any nation on the planet—and it’s cited for that vastly more frequently than is any of the countries that America has invaded or threatens to invade, or calls an ‘enemy’, is. If Americans don’t know this fact that every American needs to know, then it’s because our news media hide it from us.) Continue reading →

America’s bailout package to overcome the coronavirus ‘recession’ is twofold. Continue reading →

“The West” is the nations that are essentially controlled, basically dictated-to, by America’s approximately 600 billionaires, who control the U.S. government, by coordinately funding (through their news-media and political donations, and also by their members-only private conferences) the careers of cooperative politicians, and who thereby defeat the politicians who act against increasing the percentage of the nation’s wealth that these few people hold, and against increasing their extractions from everybody else. (Those non-compliant politicians are derisively called “socialists” and equated with the communist Joseph Stalin instead of with the democratic socialist FDR and the leaders of the democratic socialist Scandinavian countries; and America’s dumbest voters, who always tip the ‘democratic’ balance favoring the billionaires’ propaganda, believe this propaganda from these billionaires’ organizations, which equate “socialism” with “communism,” and they think that they live in a democracy, which they don’t. Their beliefs are false both about history and about ideology.) Continue reading →

On January 12, Deutsche Welle (Germany’s public broadcaster like BBC, PBS, NPR, and RT) headlined “Mayor’s resignation highlights threat to German leaders: Arnd Focke, the Social Democratic mayor of a town in Lower Saxony, was regularly threatened by nationalists. Now he has resigned. Regional officials have repeatedly faced threats across Germany.” He quit for his safety, because carrying out Germany’s compassionate policies toward the flood of mainly Middle-Eastern refugees has produced a backlash that is becoming increasingly organized and dangerous to Germany’s democracy. Continue reading →

Negotiating with the US on major issues is an exercise in futility. Continue reading →

Without enforced suppression of truth, there would be no way that the U.S. and its allied regimes could continue hiding the lies that were behind their invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Syria since 2012, and their coup against Ukraine in 2014, and also of their takeovers and attempted takeovers of other countries that had refused to be bullied by the U.S. regime into complying with its obsessive anti-Russian demands—America’s subterranean continuation of the Cold War, even after Russia had quit the Cold War in 1991. Continue reading →

Pete Buttigieg is by far the billionaires’ top darling amongst all of the Democratic candidates who are running for president, and his stand on healthcare is one of the major reasons for this. Continue reading →

Americans don’t do it voluntarily, but mainly because they don’t understand the way the US system works. Part of that is the nation’s legal system; part of it isn’t, but is instead international. Continue reading →

Robert O’Brien is a respected authority on international relations and now replaces John Bolton as U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security advisor. He is a neoconservative who feels that Barack Obama wasn’t nearly enough of a neocon. However, the differences between the two are a matter of degree, and not of type. O’Brien is a Republican who served in the Obama administration as well as in the G.W. Bush administration, and in the Trump administration, and he represents only mainstream U.S. scholarly views about international relations. Continue reading →

A fascist is a person who believes in some form of ‘solidarity’ being imposed on the nation. That’s what the term “fasces” or Latin “bundles” referred to: specifically, to “a bundle of elm or birch rods about 5 feet (1.5 metres) long and tied together with a red strap; it symbolized penal power.” It was unification by means of force, specifically the force of the “penal power” or the police and the military and the law and the chief executive officer of the nation—an imposed order or unity upon the society, the nation being tied together by means of enforced order that represents the powerful against the weak. Continue reading →

The Chinese government’s Global Times newspaper headlined on August 25, “Quitting Chinese market will be suicide for US firms”, and reported that, China is now the biggest market for some US-based enterprises, such as US automaker General Motors (GM). The automaker’s China sales came to 3.65 million cars in 2018, exceeding its total sales in the US market, where GM delivered nearly 3 million vehicles. Continue reading →

Usually, America’s Republican billionaires are obsessed against Iran, and America’s Democratic billionaires are obsessed against Russia, but nonetheless on June 30, the Boston Globe’s columnist Stephen Kinzer exaggerated when he headlined, “In an astonishing turn, George Soros and Charles Koch team up to end US ‘forever war’ policy” and he reported that, “the leftist financier George Soros and the right-wing Koch brothers have little in common. They could be seen as polar opposites.” There actually is no such basic disagreement amongst America’s billionaires regarding foreign policies, as there is regarding domestic policies—on which topics they indeed are as far apart as liberals and conservatives are. Continue reading →

U.S. President Donald Trump is trying to add to the U.S. census a question as to whether the respondent is a U.S. citizen, but that would be illegal for him to do, at present, and not because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on the matter (which it really hasn’t yet), but because the U.S. Constitution itself states in clear and unambiguous terms that he can’t do any such thing, and because no president in U.S. history has even tried to do it without having received prior explicit authorization from the Congress to do it (which is what Trump is trying to do—do it without an act of Congress)—perhaps all of them who preceded Trump had (as Trump seems not to have) read the Constitution, which makes unambiguously clear that they’re simply not allowed to add any new question, unless a law has been passed allowing him/her to. Continue reading →

On May 23, Russia’s RT headlined “Soviet Union oddly missing from US-made coin ‘saluting’ WWII Allies” and displayed a private firm’s, the Bradford Exchange’s, “commemorative” “WWII 75th Anniversary 24K Gold-Plated gold-plated” coin, which is being marketed as an ‘investment’, and which on one of its sides shows US Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and on the opposite side shows the flags of US, Britain, and France. Continue reading →

Every empire is a dictatorship. No nation can be a democracy that’s either heading an empire, or a vassal-state of one. Obviously, in order to be a vassal-state within an empire, that nation is dictated-to by the nation of which it is a colony. However, even the domestic inhabitants of the colonizing nation cannot be free and living in a democracy, because their services are needed abroad in order to impose the occupying force upon the colony or vassal-nation. This is an important burden upon the ‘citizens’ or actually the subjects of the imperial nation. Furthermore, they need to finance, via their taxes, this occupying force abroad, to a sufficient extent so as to subdue any resistance by the residents in any colony. Every empire is imposed, none is really voluntary. Conquest creates an empire, and the constant application of force maintains it. Every empire is a dictatorship, not only upon its foreign populations (which goes without saying, because otherwise there can’t be any empire), but upon its domestic ones too, upon its own subjects. Continue reading →

On May 13, Reuters headlined “Iran insists on ramping up oil sales to stay in nuclear pact” and reported that “EU officials … estimate Iran needs to sell 1.5 million bpd to keep its economy afloat. A drop below 1 million bpd could bring hardship and economic crisis.” Continue reading →